This article discusses the history of Iran from 640 ce to the present. For the history of the region before the 7th century, see Iran, ancient.

The advent of Islam (640–829)

The Arab invasion of Iran made a break with the past that affected not only Iran but all of western Asia and resulted in the assimilation of peoples who shaped and vitalized Muslim culture. (See also Islamic world.) The Prophet Muhammad had made Medina, his adopted city, and Mecca, his birthplace, centres of an Arabian movement that Muslim Arabs developed into a world movement through the conquest of Iranian and Byzantine territories. Neither Sāsānian Iran nor the Byzantine Empire had been unfamiliar to those Arabs who were the former’s Lakhmid and the latter’s Ghassānid vassals, the frontier guardians of the two empires against fellow Arabs who roamed deeper in the Arabian Desert. Also, Meccan and Medinese Arabs had established commercial connections with the Byzantines and Sāsānids. The immunity of Mecca’s ancient sanctuary, the Kaʿbah, against outlawry and outrage had promoted this city’s commercial importance. The Kaʿbah was cleansed of idols by Muhammad, who had himself once been engaged in commerce. He made it the sanctuary of a monotheistic faith whose sacred writings were filled with the injunctions and prohibitions needed by a business community for secure and stable trading.

Arab tribalism beyond urban fringes was less easily broken than idols. It was embedded in the desert sparsity that led to warfare and carefully counting a tribe’s male offspring. After Mecca and Medina had become Muslim, it was essential that the Muslims win the desert Arabs’ allegiance in order to secure the routes they depended on for trade and communication. In the process of doing this, wars over water holes, scanty pastures, men-at-arms, and camels were enlarged into international campaigns of expansion.

The vulnerability of Sāsānian Iran assisted the expansionist process. In 623 the Byzantine emperor Heraclius reversed Persian successes over Roman arms—namely, by capturing Jerusalem in 614 and winning at Chalcedon in 617. His victim, Khosrow Parvīz, died in 628 and left Iran prey to a succession of puppet rulers who were frequently deposed by a combination of nobles and Zoroastrian clergy. Thus, when Yazdegerd III, Iran’s last Sāsānid and Zoroastrian sovereign, came to the throne in 632, the year of Muhammad’s death, he inherited an empire weakened by Byzantine wars and internal dissension.

The former Arab vassals on the empire’s southwestern border realized that their moment had arrived, but their raids into Sāsānian territory were quickly taken up by Muḥammad’s caliphs, or deputies, at Medina—Abū Bakr and ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb—to become a Muslim, pan-Arab attack on Iran.

An Arab victory at Al-Qādisiyyah in 636/637 was followed by the sack of the Sāsānian winter capital at Ctesiphon on the Tigris. The Battle of Nahāvand in 642 completed the Sāsānids’ vanquishment. Yazdegerd fled to the empire’s northeastern outpost, Merv, whose marzbān, or march lord, Mahūyeh, was soured by Yazdegerd’s imperious and expensive demands. Mahūyeh turned against his emperor and defeated him with the help of Hephthalites from Bādghis. The Hephthalites, an independent border power, had troubled the Sāsānids since at least 590, when they had sided with Bahrām Chūbīn, Khosrow Parvīz’s rebel general. A miller near Merv murdered the fugitive Yazdegerd for his purse.

The Sāsānids’ end was ignominious, but it was not the end of Iran. Rather, it marked a new beginning. Within two centuries Iranian civilization was revived with a cultural amalgam, with patterns of art and thought, with attitudes and a sophistication that were indebted to its pre-Islamic Iranian heritage—a heritage changed but also stirred into fresh life by the Arab Muslim conquest.

Abū Muslim’s revolution

Less time was needed before a new Islamic beginning: Abū Muslim’s movement, which began in Khorāsān in 747 and was caused by Arab assimilation with Iranians in colonized regions. This revolution followed years of conspiracy directed from Medina and across to Khorāsān along the trade route that linked East Asia with Merv and thence with the West. Along the route, merchants with contacts in the Mesopotamian Arab garrison cities of Al-Kūfah, Wāsiṭ, and Al-Baṣrah acted as intermediaries. Iranians who converted to Islam and became clients, or al-mawālī, of Arab patrons played direct and indirect parts in the revolutionary movement. The movement also involved Arabs who had become partners with Khorāsānian and Transoxanian Iranians in ventures in the great east-west trade and intercity trade of northeastern Iran. The revolution was, nevertheless, primarily an Arab Islamic movement that intended to supplant a militaristic, tyrannical central government—whose fiscal problems made it avid for revenue—by one more sympathetic to the needs of the merchants of eastern Islam. Abū Muslim, a revolutionary of unknown origin, was able to exploit the discontent of the merchant classes in Merv as well as that of the Arab and Iranian settlers. The object of attack was the Umayyad government in Damascus.

When Muhammad died in 632, his newly established community in Medina and Mecca needed a guiding counselor, an imam, to lead them in prayers and an amīr al-muʾminīn, a “commander of the faithful,” to ensure proper application of the Prophet’s divinely inspired precepts. As the Prophet, Muhammad could never be entirely succeeded, but it was accepted that men who had sufficient dignity and who had known him could fulfill the functions, as his caliphs (deputies) and imams. After Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān was chosen for this role.

By ʿUthmān’s time, factionalism was growing among Arabs, partly the result of the jealousies and rivalries that accompanied the acquisition of new territories and partly the result of the competition between first arrivals there and those who followed. There was also uncertainty over the most desirable kind of imamate. One faction, the Shīʿites, supported ʿAlī, Muhammad’s cousin and the husband of the Prophet’s favourite daughter, Fāṭimah, for the caliphate, since he had been an intimate of Muhammad and seemed more capable than the other candidates of expressing Muhammad’s wisdom and virtue as the people’s judge. The desire for such a successor points to disenchantment with ʿUthmān’s attempt to strengthen the central government and impose demands on the colonies. His murder in 656 left his Umayyad relatives poised to avenge it, while ʿAlī was raised to the caliphate. A group of his supporters, the Khārijites, desired more freedom than ʿAlī was willing to grant, with a return to the simplest interpretation of the Prophet’s revelation in the Qurʾān, along puritanical lines.

A Khārijite killed ʿAlī in 661. The Shīʿites thenceforth crystallized into the obverse position of the Khārijites, emphasizing ʿAlī’s relationship to the Prophet as a means of making him and his descendants by Fāṭimah the sole legitimate heirs to the Prophet, some of whose spiritual power was even believed to have been transmitted to them. Centuries later this Shīʿism became the official Islamic sect of Iran. In the interim, Shīʿism was a rallying point for socially and politically discontented elements within the Muslim community. In addition to the Khārijites, another minority sect was thus formed, hostile from the beginning to the Umayyad government that seized power on ʿAlī’s death. The majority of Muslims avoided both the Shīʿite and Khārijite positions, following instead the sunnah, or “practice,” as these believers conceived the Prophet to have left it and as Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, and ʿAlī, too—known as al-khulafāʾ al-rāshidūn (Arabic: “the rightly guided caliphs”)—had observed and codified it.

Abū Muslim’s revolutionary movement was, as much as anything, representing Medinese mercantile interests in the Hejaz, dissatisfied with Umayyad inability to shelter Middle Eastern trade under a Pax Islamica. To promote the revolution aimed to destroy Umayyad power, the movement exploited Shīʿite aspirations and other forces of disenchantment. The Khārijites were excluded, since their movement opposed the idea of a caliphate of the kind Abū Muslim’s adherents were fighting to establish—one that could command sufficient respect to hold together an Islamic universal state. A discontented element ready to Abū Muslim’s hand in Khorāsān, however, was not a religious grouping but Arab settlers and Iranian cultivators who were burdened by taxation.

In Iran the first Arab conquerors had concluded treaties with local Iranian magnates who had assumed authority when the Sāsānian imperial government disintegrated. These notables—the marzbāns and landlords (dehqāns)—undertook to continue tax collection on behalf of the new Muslim power. The advent of Arab colonizers, who preferred to cultivate the land rather than campaign farther into Asia, produced a further complication. Once the Arabs had settled in Iranian lands, they, like the Iranian cultivators, were required to pay the kharāj, or land tax, which was collected by Iranian notables for the Muslims in a system similar to that which had predated the conquest. The system was ripe for abuse, and the Iranian collectors extorted large sums, arousing the hostility of both Arabs and Persians.

Another source of discontent was the jizyah, or head tax, which was applied to non-Muslims of the tolerated religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. After they converted to Islam, Iranians expected to be exempt from this tax. But the Umayyad government, burdened with imperial expenses, often refused to exempt the Iranian converts.

The tax demands of the Damascus government were as distasteful to those urbanized Arabs and Iranians in commerce as they were to those in agriculture, and hopes of easier conditions under the new rulers than under the Sāsānids were not fully realized. The Umayyads ignored Iranian agricultural conditions, which required constant reinvestment to maintain irrigation works and to halt the encroachment of the desert. This no doubt made the tax burden, from which no returns were visible, all the more odious. Furthermore, the regime failed to maintain the peace so necessary to trade. Damascus feared the breaking away of remote provinces where the Arab colonists were becoming assimilated with the local populations. The government, therefore, deliberately encouraged tribal factionalism in order to prevent a united opposition against it.

Thus the revolution set out to establish an Islamic ecumene above divisions and sectarianism, the Pax Islamica already referred to, which commerce required and which Iranian merchants without status in the Sāsānian social hierarchy looked to Islam to provide. Ease of communication from the Oxus (modern Amu Darya) River to the Mediterranean Sea was wanted but without what seemed like a nest of robbers calling themselves a government and straddling the route at Damascus. In 750 Umayyad power was destroyed, and the revolution gave the caliphate to the ʿAbbāsids (see Islamic world and Iraq: The ʿAbbāsid Caliphate).

Hejazi commercial interests had in a sense overcome the military party among leading Muslim Arabs. Greater concern for the east was manifested by the new caliphate’s choice of Baghdad as its capital—situated on the Tigris a short distance north of Ctesiphon and designed as a new city, to be free of the factions of the old Umayyad garrison cities of Al-Kūfah, Wāsiṭ, and Al-Baṣrah.

The ʿAbbāsid Caliphate (750–821)

The revolution that established the ʿAbbāsids represented a triumph of the Islamic Hejazi elements within the empire; the Iranian revival was yet to come. Nevertheless, ʿAbbāsid concern with fostering eastern Islam made the new caliphs willing to borrow the methods and procedures of statecraft employed by their Iranian predecessors. At Damascus the Umayyads had imitated Sāsānian court etiquette, but at Baghdad Persianizing influences went deeper and aroused some resentment among the Arabs, who were nostalgic for the legendary simplicity of human relations among the desert Arabs of yore. Self-conscious schools of manners grew up in the new metropolis, representing the competitive merits of the Arabs’ or Persians’ ancient ways. To counter the widespread Arab chauvinism still present after the ʿAbbāsid revolution, there arose a literary-political movement known as the shuʿūbiyyah, which celebrated the excellence of non-Arab Muslim peoples, particularly the Persians, and set the stage for the resurgence of Iranian literature and culture in the decades to come. Regard for poetry—the Arabs’ vehicle of folk memory—increased, and minds and imaginations were quickened. Philosophical enquiry was developed out of the need for precision about the meaning of Holy Writ and for the establishment of the authenticity of the Prophet’s dicta, collected as Hadith—sayings traditionally ascribed to him and recollected and preserved for posterity by his companions. An amalgam known as Islamic civilization was thus being forged in Baghdad in the 8th and 9th centuries. The Iranian intellect, however, played a conspicuous part in what was still an Arab milieu. Works of Indian provenance were translated into Arabic from Pahlavi, the written language of Sāsānian Iran, notably by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (c. 720–757). The wisdom of both the ancient East and West was received and discussed in Baghdad’s schools. The metropolis’s outposts confronted Byzantium as well as infidel marches in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Cultural influences came from both directions. Curiosity in the pursuit of knowledge had been enjoined by the Prophet “even as far as China.” This cosmopolitanism was not new to the descendants of the urban Arabs of Mecca or to the Iranians, whose land lay across the routes from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. Both peoples knew how to transmute what was not originally their own into forms that were entirely Islamic. Islam had liberated men of the scribal and mercantile classes who in Iran had been subject to the dictates of a taboo-ridden and excessively ritualized Zoroastrianism and who in Arabia had been inhibited by tribal feuds and prejudices.

Despite the development of a distinctive Islamic culture, the military problems of the empire were left unsolved. The ʿAbbāsids were under pressure from the infidel on several fronts—Turks in Central Asia, pagans in India and in the Hindu Kush, and Christians in Byzantium. War for the faith, or jihad, against these infidels was a Muslim duty. But, whereas the Umayyads had been expansionists and had seen themselves as heads of a military empire, the ʿAbbāsids were more pacific and saw themselves as the supporters of more than an Arab, conquering militia. Yet rebellions within the imperial frontiers had to be contained and the frontiers protected.

Rebellion within the empire took the form of peasant revolts in Azerbaijan and Khorāsān, coalesced by popular religious appeals centred on men who assumed or were accorded mysterious powers. Abū Muslim—executed in 755 by the second ʿAbbāsid caliph, al-Manṣūr, who feared his influence—became one such messianic figure. Another was al-Muqannaʿ (Arabic: “the Veiled One”), who used Abū Muslim’s mystique and whose movement lasted from 777 to 780. The Khorram-dīnān (Persian: “Glad Religionists”), under the Azerbaijanian Bābak (816–838), also necessitated vigorous military suppression. Bābak eluded capture for two decades, defying the caliph in Azerbaijan and western Persia, before being caught and brought to Baghdad to be tortured and executed. These heresiarchs revived such creeds as that of the anti-Sāsānid religious leader Mazdak (died 528 or 529), expressive of social and millenarian aspirations that were later canalized into Sufism on the one hand and into Shīʿism on the other.

Sīstān, Iran’s southeastern border area, had a tradition of chivalry as the ancient homeland of Iranian military champions. Their tales passed to posterity collectively in the deeds of Rostam, son of Zāl, in Ferdowsī’s Shāh-nāmeh, the Persian national epic. On the route to India, Sīstān was also a centre of trade. Its agrarian masses were counterbalanced by an urban population whose economy could be bolstered by plunder gained through military forays into still non-Muslim areas under the rule of the southern Hephthalites—the Zunbīls of the Hindu Kush’s southwestern flanks—whose command of trade routes with India had to be contested when the existing partnership in this command broke down.

Early exploitation of the province’s agriculture by Arab governors had, however, debilitated the rural life, and Khārijites, who found refuge in Sīstān from the Umayyads, organized or attracted bands of local peasants and vagabonds who had strayed south from Khorāsān. The presence of these groups indicates agricultural depression following the first century of rule by nonagricultural Arabs who had failed to grasp the needs of the Iranian cultivators. Khārijite bands isolated the cities and threatened their supplies. Sīstān needed an urban champion who could come to terms with the Khārijites and divert them to what could legitimately be termed jihad across the border, forming the gangsters into a well-disciplined loyal army. Such a man was Yaʿqūb ibn Layth, who founded the Ṣaffārid dynasty, the first purely Iranian dynasty of the Islamic era, and threatened the Muslim empire with the first resurgence of Iranian independence.

The “Iranian intermezzo” (821–1055)

Yaʿqūb ibn Layth’s movement differed from Ṭāhir ibn al-Ḥusayn’s establishment of a dynasty of Iranian governors over Khorāsān in 821. The latter’s rise marks the caliph’s recognition, after the difficulties encountered in Iran by Hārūn al-Rashīd (reigned 786–809), that the best way for the imam and amīr al-muʾminīn at Baghdad to ensure military effectiveness in eastern Islam was by appointing a great general to govern Khorāsān. Ṭāhir had won Baghdad from Hārūn’s son al-Amīn in favour of his other son, al-Maʾmūn, in the civil war between the two after their father’s death. Ṭāhir was descended from the mawālī of an Arab leader in eastern Khorāsān. He was, therefore, of Iranian origin, but, unlike Yaʿqūb, he did not emerge out of his own folk and because of a regional need. Instead, he rose as a servant of the caliphate, as whose lieutenant he was, in due course, appointed to govern a great frontier province. He made Neyshābūr his capital. Though he died shortly after gaining the right of having his name mentioned after the caliph’s in the khuṭbah (the formal sermon at the Friday congregations of Muslims when those with authority over the community were mentioned after the Prophet), his family was sufficiently influential and respected at Baghdad to retain the governorship of Neyshābūr until the Ṭāhirids were ousted from the city by Yaʿqūb in 873. Thereafter they retired to Baghdad.

Discussion of the rise of “independent” Persian dynasties such as the Ṭāhirid in the 9th century has to be qualified: not only does the skillful ʿAbbāsid statecraft need to be considered, but also the Muslims’ need for legality in a juridical-religious setting must be recognized. The majority of Muslims considered the caliph to be the legitimate head of the faith and the guarantor of the law. Such a guarantee was preeminently the need of merchants in the cities of Sīstān, Transoxania, and central Iran.

In the Caspian provinces of Gīlān and Ṭabaristān (Māzandarān) the situation was different. The Elburz Mountains had been a barrier against the integration of these areas into the Caliphate. Small princely families—the Bāvands, including the Kāʾūsiyyeh and the Espahbadiyyeh (665–1349), and the Musāfirids, also known as Sallārids or Kangarids (916–c. 1090)—had remained independent of the caliphal capitals, Damascus and Baghdad, in the mountains of Daylam. When Islam reached these old Iranian enclaves, it was brought by Shīʿite leaders in flight from metropolitan persecution. It was not the Islam of the Sunni state.

The Ṣaffārids

Yaʿqūb ibn Layth began life as an apprentice ṣaffār (Arabic: “coppersmith”), hence his dynasty’s name, Ṣaffārid. Taking to military freebooting, he mustered an army that he disciplined and regularly paid in cash, absorbing many Khārijites into its ranks. This and his extension of Islam into pagan areas of Sind and Afghanistan earned him the caliph’s gratitude, which Yaʿqūb courted by sending golden idols captured from infidels to be paraded in Baghdad. Yaʿqūb’s attitude toward the imam’s claiming political subservience was, nevertheless, strikingly similar to that of the caliph-rejecting Khārijites. He turned his attention inward instead of outside the pale of Islam. He seized Baghdad’s breadbaskets—Fārs and Khūzestān—and drove the Ṭāhirid emir from Neyshābūr. His march on Baghdad itself was halted only by the stratagem devised by the caliph’s commander in chief, who inundated Yaʿqūb’s army by bursting dikes. Yaʿqūb died soon after, in 879. He had made an empire, minted his own coinage, fashioned a new style of army loyal to its leader rather than to any religious or doctrinal concept, and required that verses in his praise be put into his own language—Persian—from Arabic, which he did not understand. He began the Iranian resurgence.

The collapse of the Ṭāhirid viceroyalty left Baghdad faced with a power vacuum in Khorāsān and southern Persia. The caliph reluctantly confirmed Yaʿqūb’s brother ʿAmr as governor of Fārs and Khorāsān but withdrew his recognition on three occasions, and ʿAmr’s authority was disclaimed to the Khorāsānian pilgrims to Mecca when they passed through Baghdad. But ʿAmr remained useful to Baghdad so long as Khorāsān was victimized by the rebels Aḥmad al-Khujistānī and, for longer, Rāfiʿ ibn Harthama. After Rāfiʿ had been finally defeated in 896, ʿAmr’s broader ambitions gave the caliph al-Muʿtaḍid his chance. ʿAmr conceived designs on Transoxania, but there the Sāmānids held the caliph’s license to rule, after having nominally been Ṭāhirid deputies. When ʿAmr demanded and obtained the former Ṭāhirid tutelage over the Sāmānids in 898, Baghdad could leave the Ṣaffārid and Sāmānid to fight each other, and the Sāmānid Ismāʿīl (reigned 892–907) won. ʿAmr was sent to Baghdad, where he was put to death in 902. His family survived as Sāmānid vassals in Sīstān and were heard of until the 16th century. Yaʿqūb remains a popular hero in Iranian history.

The Sāmānids

There was nothing of the popular hero in the Sāmānids’ origin. Their eponym was Sāmān-Khodā, a landlord in the district of Balkh and, according to the dynasty’s claims, a descendant of Bahrām Chūbīn, the Sāsānian general. Sāmān became Muslim. His four grandsons were rewarded for services to the caliph al-Maʾmūn (reigned 813–833) and received the caliph’s investiture for areas that included Samarkand and Herāt. They thus gained wealthy Transoxanian and east Khorāsānian entrepôt cities, where they could profit from trade that reached across Asia, even as far as Scandinavia, and from providing Turkish slaves—much in demand in Baghdad as royal troops—while they protected the frontiers and provided security for merchants in Bukhara, Samarkand, Khujand, and Herāt. With one transitory exception, they upheld Sunnism and at each new accession to power paid a tribute to Baghdad for the tokens of investiture from the caliph whereby their rule represented lawful authority. Thus, legal transactions in Sāmānid realms would be valid, and Baghdad received tribute in return for the insignia prayed over and signed by the caliph. This tribute took the place of regular revenue, so that it represented a solution of the taxation problems and consequent resentments that had bedeviled the Umayyad regime. In modern assessments of imperial power, Baghdad may seem to have been politically the weaker for this type of arrangement, but ensuring the reign of Islam in peripheral provinces was important to the caliphs. Islam’s portals to East Asia were adequately guarded, the supply of Turkish slaves essential for the caliph’s bodyguard was maintained, and Turkish pagan tribes were converted to Islam under the Sāmānids.

The Iranian renaissance

The Sāmānid aura lasted from 819 until it was eclipsed in 999. Its supremacy in northeastern Islam began in 875, when the Sāmānid emir, Naṣr I, received the license to govern all of Transoxania. Sāmānid emirs succeeded the Ṭāhirid-Ṣaffārid power in Khorāsān, and under them the Iranian renaissance at last came to fruition. Shaped out of the vernacular of northeastern Iranian courts and households and making skillful use of additional Arabic vocabulary, the Persian language emerged as a literary medium. Persian notation had been used in the first Muslim dīwāns, or chancelleries, in accountancy, because the first civil servants in the old Iranian areas had been Iranians. In 697 the ruthless Umayyad governor Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf had ordered the change to Arabic notation, marking the final dethronement of Pahlavi characters. When Modern Persian began to develop as a written language two centuries later, its alphabet was Arabic. It emerged as poetry, by which it was disciplined into a most expressive and flexible tongue, with the flexibility resulting from perfect control of a highly formal medium. The discipline was that of Arabic prosody, to which scenes of a verdure unknown to the Arab poet in the desert added, in the words of Iranian poets, a new and lustrous imagery. Rivaling the Arabs’ tales of ancient valour was the Iranian legend versified under Sāmānid patronage in the Shāh-nāmeh (“Book of Kings”), Iran’s national epic, composed by Ferdowsī of Ṭūs in Khorāsān over a 30-year period and finally completed after the eclipse of the Sāmānids, in 1009/10.

Under the Sāmānids, Bukhara rivaled Baghdad as a cultural capital of Islam. Besides the Persian poet Rūdakī (died 940/941), who had crystallized the language and imagery of Persian lyrical poetry as Ferdowsī (died between 1020 and 1026) was to do for that of the epic, patrons such as Naṣr II (reigned 914–943) attracted poets and scholars to Bukhara, many producing literary and academic works in both Persian and Arabic. A written Persian evolved that has survived with remarkably little change.

The Ghaznavids

Rūdakī, in a poem about the Sāmānid emir’s court, describes how “row upon row” of Turkish slave guards were part of its adornment. From these guards’ ranks two military families arose—the Sīmjūrids and Ghaznavids—who ultimately proved disastrous to the Sāmānids. The Sīmjūrids received an appanage in the Kūhestān region of southern Khorāsān. Alp Tigin founded the Ghaznavid fortunes when he established himself at Ghazna (modern Ghaznī, Afghanistan) in 962. He and Abū al-Ḥasan Sīmjūrī, as Sāmānid generals, competed with each other for the governorship of Khorāsān and control of the Sāmānid empire by placing on the throne emirs they could dominate. Abū al-Ḥasan died in 961, but a court party instigated by men of the scribal class—civilian ministers as contrasted with Turkish generals—rejected Alp Tigin’s candidate for the Sāmānid throne. Manṣūr I was installed, and Alp Tigin prudently retired to his fief of Ghazna. The Sīmjūrids enjoyed control of Khorāsān south of the Oxus but were hard-pressed by a third great Iranian dynasty, the Būyids, and were unable to survive the collapse of the Sāmānids and the rise of the Ghaznavids.

The struggles of the Turkish slave generals for mastery of the throne with the help of shifting allegiance from the court’s ministerial leaders both demonstrated and accelerated the Sāmānid decline. Sāmānid weakness attracted into Transoxania the Qarluq Turks, who had recently converted to Islam. They occupied Bukhara in 992 to establish in Transoxania the Qarakhanid, or Ilek Khanid, dynasty. Alp Tigin had been succeeded at Ghazna by Sebüktigin (died 997). Sebüktigin’s son Maḥmūd made an agreement with the Qarakhanids whereby the Oxus was recognized as their mutual boundary. Thus the Sāmānids’ dominion was divided and Maḥmūd was freed to advance westward into Khorāsān to meet the Būyids.

The Būyids

The Būyids (or Buwayhids) share with the Sāmānids the palm for having brought to fruition the Iranian renaissance. They achieved Iranian political reascendancy by doing what Yaʿqūb ibn Layth had failed to do and what the Sāmānids would probably have considered illegal to do: they captured Baghdad and made the caliph their puppet. As far east as the city of Rayy, western, central, and southern Iran were once more ruled by an Iranian dynasty. At the peak of the Būyid empire, the Būyid base second to Baghdad became Fārs, whence the Achaemenids and the Sāsānids had sprung. Politically, the Būyids effected the Iranianization of the metropolitan government in Baghdad. Yet, by the very fact that they saw in the caliphate an institution of enough purely political significance to merit its dramatic takeover, they paradoxically left the caliphate’s political role emphasized by what at first sight might seem to have been deepest humiliation. Spiritually, the caliphate held no appeal for the Būyids, who were Shīʿite. Politically and juridically, as the stabilizing factor over the Islamic peoples, the Būyids, in spite of their own religious affiliation, maintained the caliphate.

The homeland of the Būyids was Daylam, in the Gīlān uplands in northern Iran. There, at the end of the 9th century, hardy valley dwellers had been stirred into martial activity by a number of factors, among them the rebel Rāfiʿ ibn Harthama’s attempt to penetrate the region, ostensibly with Sāmānid support. ʿAmr ibn Layth had pursued the rebel into the region. Other factors had been the formation of Shīʿite principalities in the area and continued Sāmānid attempts to subjugate them. After the Ṭāhirid collapse, the lack of stability in northern Iran south of the Elburz Mountains attracted many Daylamite mercenaries into the area on military adventures. Among them Mākān ibn Kākī served the Sāmānids with his compatriots, the sons of Būyeh, and their allies the Ziyārids under Mardāvīj. Mardāvīj introduced the three Būyid brothers to the Iranian plateau, where he established an empire reaching as far south as Eṣfahān and Hamadān. He was murdered in 935, but his Ziyārid descendants sought Sāmānid protection. They adhered to Sunnism and maintained themselves in the region southeast of the Caspian Sea. The Ziyārid Qābūs ibn Voshmgīr (reigned 978–1012) built himself a tomb tower, the Gonbad-e Qābūs (1006–07), which remains one of Iran’s finest monuments. Also still extant is a work of his descendant ʿUnṣur al-Maʿālī Keykāʾūs (reigned 1049–90), the Qābūs-nāmeh, a prose “Mirror for Princes,” which is a valuable document on the social and political life of the time.

Mardāvīj’s expansionism south of the Elburz was taken up by his Būyid lieutenants: the eldest brother, ʿAlī, consolidated power for himself in Eṣfahān and Fārs and obtained the caliph’s recognition; another brother, Ḥasan, occupied Rayy and Hamadān; and the youngest brother, Aḥmad, took Kermān in the southeast and Khūzestān in the southwest. The caliphs al-Muttaqī and al-Mustakfī of the 940s were at the mercy of the Turkish slaves in their palace guard. The generals of the guard competed with each other for the office of amīr al-umarāʾ (commander in chief), who virtually ruled Iraq on behalf of the caliphs. When Aḥmad gained Khūzestān, he was close to the scene of the amīr al-umarāʾ contests, which he chose to settle by himself. Aḥmad entered Baghdad in 945 and assumed control of the caliphate’s political functions. The caliph became a Būyid protégé and conferred on Aḥmad the title of Muʿizz al-Dawlah. ʿAlī became ʿImād al-Dawlah, and Ḥasan became Rukn al-Dawlah. All these titles implied that the Būyids were the upholders of the Muslim ʿAbbāsid dawlah, or state. In practice, however, the dawlah became a Daylamite state. It should be noted that the titles the caliph assigned the Būyids did not include the word dīn, or religion (as in Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, “Righteousness of Religion”), which the caliph awarded exclusively to Sunni officials, thus emphasizing the continuing independence of the caliphate as a religious institution.

Later Būyid titles increased in grandeur. Even the old Achaemenian title of shāhanshāh, king of kings, reappeared—a title Aḥmad may have thought appropriate for an Iranian whose family reconquered Iran south of the Elburz Mountains. As suggested above, Būyid titles emphasized political and territorial sovereignty. This sovereignty reached its greatest extent under Rukn al-Dawlah’s son, ʿAḍud al-Dawlah, who, after the deaths of his father and uncles, ruled an empire that comprised all of Persia west and south of Khorāsān and included Iraq, with Baghdad at its heart. ʿAḍud al-Dawlah pursued peace negotiations with Byzantium, perhaps to free himself for his cherished project of an Egyptian campaign against the rival caliphate of the Shīʿite Fāṭimids, established in North Africa in 909, which had been relocated in Egypt in 969. ʿAḍud al-Dawlah’s concern with the middle kingdom and its westward extension toward the Mediterranean increased his hostility toward the Fāṭimids, despite his own Shīʿite persuasion. In the north he drove the Ziyārids out of Ṭabaristān, which struck a blow against the Sāmānids’ influence in the Caspian area.

ʿAḍud al-Dawlah is celebrated for public works, of which the dam he built across the Kor River near Shīrāz, the Band-e Amīr (“Prince’s Dam”), remains. He embellished the tomb of ʿAlī at Al-Najaf in Iraq, where he himself was also buried. He built libraries, schools, and hospitals, and he was the patron of the Arabic poet al-Mutanabbī. Some Arabic verses of his own are still extant. Although ʿAḍud al-Dawlah was undoubtedly one of Iran’s greatest rulers, his fratricidal wars, conducted with terrible intractability on his way to power, initiated Būyid decline. The descendants of the early Būyids reversed the mutual fidelity of the first three brothers. The power this fidelity had achieved and ʿAḍud al-Dawlah had made into a world force crumbled after his death in 983.

His base had been Shīrāz, which he beautified and established as a cultural centre, but he died at Baghdad, where he chose to keep close to the caliph, whose daughter he married and from whom he took the title “the Crown of the Community” and the privilege, like the caliph, of having drums beaten at his gate on the calls to prayer. He also had his name mentioned after that of the caliph al-Ṭaʾiʿ in the khuṭbah. The Būyids avoided the policy, which in all likelihood would have disrupted the empire, of favouring the Shīʿites. Instead, they offered consolations of an emotional sort to the Shīʿites in the form of public rites on the anniversaries of the Shīʿite martyrs, notably the one commemorating the massacre of ʿAlī’s son Ḥusayn and his followers under the Umayyads at Karbalāʾ in Iraq.

Although the Būyids were careful to avoid sectarian strife, family quarrels weakened them sufficiently for Maḥmūd of Ghazna to gain Rayy in 1029. But Maḥmūd (reigned 998–1030) went no farther: his dynasty paid great deference to the caliphate’s legitimating power, and he made no bid to contest the Būyids’ role as its protectors. Maḥmūd’s agreement with the Sāmānids’ Ilek Khanid successors, that the Oxus should be their mutual boundary, held, but south of the river the Ghaznavids had to contend with their own distant relatives, the Oğuz Turks. Contrary to the sage counsel of Iranian ministers, Maḥmūd and his successor Masʿūd (reigned 1031–41) permitted these tribesmen to use Khorāsānian grazing grounds, which they entered from north of the Oxus. United under descendants of an Oğuz leader named Seljuq, between 1038 and 1040 these nomads drove the Ghaznavids out of northeastern Iran. The final encounter was at Dandānqān in 1040.

After their defeat by the Seljuqs, the Ghaznavids, patrons of Islamic culture and letters, were deflected eastward into India, where Maḥmūd had already conducted successful raids. The raids took the form of jihad (or holy war), and the Ghaznavids carried Islam and Persian Muslim art to the Indian subcontinent. In Iran it was the Seljuqs’ turn to create a new imperial synthesis with the ʿAbbāsid caliphs. Ṭoghrıl Beg, the Seljuq sultan, entered Baghdad in 1055, and Būyid power was terminated, thus ending what Vladimir Minorsky, the great Iranologist, called the “Iranian intermezzo.”

The Seljuqs and the Mongols

The Seljuqs

Ṭoghrıl I had proclaimed himself sultan at Neyshābūr in 1038 and had espoused strict Sunnism, by which he gained the caliph’s confidence and undermined the Būyid position in Baghdad. The Oğuz Turks had accepted Islam late in the 10th century, and their leaders displayed a convert’s zeal in their efforts to restore a Muslim polity along orthodox lines. Their efforts were made all the more urgent by the spread of Fāṭimid Ismāʿīlī propaganda (Arabic daʿwah) in the eastern Caliphate by means of an underground network of propagandists, or dāʿīs, intent on undermining the Būyid regime, and by the threat posed by the Christian Crusaders.

The Būyids’ usurpation of the caliph’s secular power had given rise to a new theory of state formulated by al-Māwardī (died 1058). Al-Māwardī’s treatise partly prepared the theoretical ground for Ṭoghrıl’s attempt to establish an orthodox Muslim state in which conflict between the caliph-imam’s spiritual-juridical authority on the one side and the secular power of the sultan on the other could be resolved, or at least regulated, by convention. Al-Māwardī reminded the Muslim world of the necessity of the imamate; but the treatise realistically admitted the existence of, and thus accommodated, the fact of military usurpation of power. The Seljuqs’ own political theorist al-Ghazālī (died 1111) carried this admission further by explaining that the position of a powerless caliph, overshadowed by a strong Seljuq master, was one in which the latter’s presence guaranteed the former’s capacity to defend and extend Islam.

The caliph al-Qāʾim (reigned 1031–75) replaced the last Būyid’s name, al-Malik al-Raḥīm, in the khuṭbah and on the coins with that of Ṭoghrıl Beg; and, after protracted negotiation ensuring restoration of the caliph’s dignity after Shīʿite subjugation, Ṭoghrıl entered Baghdad in December 1055. The caliph enthroned him and married a Seljuq princess. After Ṭoghrıl had campaigned successfully as far as Syria, he was given the title of “king of the east and west.” The new situation was justified by the theory that existing practice was legal whereby a new caliph could be instituted by the sultan, who possessed effective power and sovereignty, but that thereafter the sultan owed the caliph allegiance because only so long as the caliph-imam’s juridical faculties were recognized could government be valid.

Ṭoghrıl Beg died in 1063. His heir, Alp-Arslan, was succeeded by Malik-Shah in 1072, and the latter’s death in 1092 led to succession disputes out of which Berk-Yaruq emerged triumphant to reign until 1105. After a brief reign, Malik-Shah II was succeeded by Muḥammad I (reigned 1105–18). The last “Great Seljuq” was Sanjar (1118–57), who had earlier been governor of Khorāsān.

Alp-Arslan had nearly annihilated the Byzantine army at Manzikert in 1071, opening Asia Minor to those dependent tribesmen of the Seljuqs of whom Iran and the world were to hear more in the period of Ottoman power. Transoxania was subdued, the Christians in the Caucasus chastised, and the Fāṭimids expelled from Syria. An empire was for a short time achieved whose extent and stability enabled Alp-Arslan’s and Malik-Shah’s great minister, Niẓām al-Mulk (died 1092), to pay a ferryman on the Oxus River with a draft cashable in Damascus.

Building and maintaining such a great empire necessitated a military regime and a vast war machine. The price to be paid later was oppression by military commanders and their units, set free to compete with each other and harry the land after the machine fell out of the grasp of powerful sultans. The soldiers had been remunerated by grants of land called iqṭāʿs, which were originally usufructuary but developed over time into hereditary properties. The grants later became nuclei out of which petty principalities grew with the decline of the central power. The cultivators were left at the mercy of military overlords in possession of the soil.

The great minister Niẓām al-Mulk was typical of the Iranian bureaucracy, which, in an area prone to invasion, was often called on to attempt to cushion the impact of the brute military force of nomadic invaders and contain it within the bounds of administrative, economic, and cultural feasibility. For his Turkish masters he wrote the Seyāsat-nāmeh (“Book of Government”), in which he urged the regulation of royal court procedures in line with Sāmānid models and the restriction of the arrogance and cupidity of the military fief holders. His book is the measure of the Seljuqs’ failure to provide enduring stability and equitable government. Had they done so, such a work would have been unnecessary.

The Ismāʿīliyyah

Of one disruptive force Niẓām al-Mulk’s book is dramatically descriptive, in terms betraying near panic. The Seljuqs failed to nip in the bud the power of the Ismāʿīliyyah, originally spread throughout the eastern Islamic world by clandestine Fāṭimid dāʿīs—many of whose cells later split from the mainstream of events in Egypt to become an independent organization within the Seljuq empire. This organization exercised power by terrorism, and the name given its adherents by Europeans in the Middle Ages, Assassins (from ḥashīshī, denoting a consumer of hashish), has become a common noun in English. Ismāʿīlī doctrine consisted of an esoteric system combining extremist (Arabic ghulāt) Shīʿite beliefs and a complex theology heavily permeated by the form and content of Hellenistic philosophy. Ismāʿīliyyah recognized only 7 of the imams in descent from ʿAlī and Fāṭimah, whereas the Ithnā ʿAsharī Shīʿism—that followed by the Būyids and the dominant sect of modern Iran—recognized 12.

The movement in Iran crystallized under the leadership of Ḥasan-e Ṣabbāḥ, who had been trained in Fāṭimid Egypt. In 1090 Ḥasan gained the castle of Alamūt in the Elburz Mountains, and the order’s principal cells were thereafter situated, so far as possible, in similar impregnable mountain strongholds. From these centres, fidāʾīs, or devotees ready to sacrifice their lives, issued forth and permeated society, spreading their mission as peddlers and itinerant tailors and gaining influence among the urban artisan and weaving classes. They were also often able to win the confidence of many highly placed women and children, whom they could please with novelties of dress or toys. Niẓām al-Mulk himself was assassinated by one of the fidāʾīs, but it is possible that this was done with the connivance of one of Malik-Shah’s wives, whose son the vizier did not support for the succession.

The Ismāʿīliyyah were able to puncture Seljuq power but not destroy it. In the end the Seljuq empire collapsed where it had begun—in Khorāsān, where Sultan Sanjar ultimately failed to control Turkmen tribes related to him by blood. Sanjar could not rely on military commanders his family had raised to high posts and had rewarded with land and provincial powers. The tribesmen refused to be coerced into paying taxes. In 1153 they captured the old sultan and, although allowing him all the respect of his regal position, kept him captive for three years.

The Khwārezm-Shahs

Atsiz was the military leader who, after Sultan Sanjar’s capture in 1153, succeeded in supplanting Seljuq power in northeastern Iran. His ancestor, Anūṣtegin, had been keeper of Malik-Shah’s kitchen utensils and had been rewarded with the governorship of Khwārezm on the Oxus, where he founded the Khwārezm-Shah dynasty (c. 1077–1231). Regions elsewhere in Iran, on the passing of Seljuq supremacy, became independent under atabegs, who were originally proxy fathers and tutors sent with young Seljuq princes when these were deputed to govern provinces. At first the atabegs took power in the names of Seljuq puppets. When this fiction lapsed, atabeg dynasties such as the Eldegüzids of Azerbaijan (c. 1137–1225) and Salghurids of Fārs (c. 1148–1270) split Iran into independent rival principalities.

The Salghurid court in Shīrāz especially fostered the arts, as parvenu, competitive courts are wont to do. The poet Saʿdī (died 1292) was a contemporary in Shīrāz of the Salghurid atabeg Abū Bakr ibn Saʿd ibn Zangī (reigned 1231–60), whom he mentions by name in his Būstān (“The Orchard”), a book of ethics in verse. Abū Bakr’s father, Saʿd, for whom Saʿdī took his pen name, conferred great prosperity on Shīrāz.

Saʿd ibn Zangī came to terms with the Khwārezm-Shahs. Their power in Transoxania was secured by acceptance of tributary status to the non-Muslim Karakitai empire of Central Asia. They endeavoured to emulate the Seljuqs by following an expansionist policy in Iran south of the Oxus. Saʿd ibn Zangī, in his relations with the Khwārezm-Shah, set the pattern his successor Abū Bakr followed later. These atabegs saved Fārs from outright invasion by northern military powers by paying heavy tribute. This tribute was the price of Shīrāz’s remaining the peaceful haven of the arts in which Saʿdī and after him Ḥāfeẓ (died 1390) flourished, to continue the Persian literary tradition begun under the Sāmānids and continued under both the Ghaznavids and the Seljuqs.

The collapse of the Karakitai empire northeast of the Oxus was partly accelerated by the unsuccessful bid of Khwārezm-Shah ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad (reigned 1200–20) to win Muslim approval while releasing himself from the Khwārezm-Shahs’ humiliating tributary status to an infidel power. But the coup de grâce to the Karakitai empire was delivered by its own vassal from the east, the Mongol leader Küchlüg Khan, who from 1211 onward was to be a direct opponent of the Khwārezm-Shahs in Central Asia. The Karakitai had been defeated, but the situation on the Khwārezm-Shah’s eastern border had worsened.

Meanwhile, Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad quarreled with the caliph; he set up an anticaliph of his own and further antagonized his Muslim subjects, who were unremittingly suspicious of a regime once subject to the Karakitai infidels and whose Kipchak mercenary militia and brutal commanders brought cruelty and desolation wherever they marched. ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad was unable to control his army leaders, who had tribal connections with such influential people at court as his own mother. The post-Karakitai wars between him and Küchlüg Khan damaged the safety of the Central Asian trade arteries from China to the West. The great Mongol leader Genghis Khan took Beijing in 1215 and, as lord of China, was concerned with Chinese trade outlets. The situation between Küchlüg and the Khwārezm-Shah sultan afforded scope as well as a pretext for the Mongols’ westward advance, if only to restore the flow of trade.

The Mongol invasion

Misunderstanding of how essentially fragile Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad Khwārezm-Shah’s apparently imposing empire was, its distance away from the Mongols’ eastern homelands, and the strangeness of new terrain all doubtless induced fear in the Mongols, and this might partly account for the terrible events with which Genghis Khan’s name has ever since been associated. The terror his invasion brought must also be ascribed to his quest for vengeance. Genghis Khan’s first two missions to Khwārezm had been massacred; but the place of commercial motives in the Mongol’s decision to march to the west is indicated by the fact that the first was a trade mission. The massacre and robbery of this mission at Utrār by one of ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad’s governors before it reached the capital made Genghis single out Utrār for especially savage treatment when the murder of his second, purely diplomatic, mission left him no alternative but war.

His guides were Muslim merchants from Transoxania. They had to witness one of the worst catastrophes of history. During 1220–21 Bukhara, Samarkand, Herāt, Ṭūs, and Neyshābūr were razed, and the whole populations were slaughtered. The Khwārezm-Shah fled, to die on an island off the Caspian coast. His son Jalāl al-Dīn survived until murdered in Kurdistan in 1231. He had eluded Genghis Khan on the Indus River, across which his horse swam, enabling him to escape to India. He returned to attempt restoring the Khwārezmian empire over Iran. However, he failed to unite the Iranian regions, even though Genghis Khan had withdrawn to Mongolia, where he died in August 1227. Iran was left divided, with Mongol agents remaining in some districts and local adventurers profiting from the lack of order in others.

The Il-Khans

A second Mongol invasion began when Genghis Khan’s grandson Hülegü Khan crossed the Oxus in 1256 and destroyed the Assassin fortress at Alamūt. With the disintegration of the Seljuq empire, the Caliphate had reasserted control in the area around Baghdad and in southwestern Iran. In 1258 Hülegü besieged Baghdad, where divided counsels prevented the city’s salvation. Al-Mustaʿṣim, the last ʿAbbāsid caliph of Baghdad, was trampled to death by mounted troops (in the style of Mongol royal executions), and eastern Islam fell to pagan rulers.

Hülegü hoped to consolidate Mongol rule over western Asia and to extend the Mongol empire as far as the Mediterranean, an empire that would span the Earth from China to the Levant. Hülegü made Iran his base, but the Mamlūks of Egypt (1250–1517) prevented him and his successors from achieving their great imperial goal, by decisively defeating a Mongol army at ʿAyn Jālūt in 1260. Instead, a Mongol dynasty, the Il-Khans, or “deputy khans” to the great khan in China, was established in Iran to attempt repair of the damage of the first Mongol invasion. The injuries Iran had suffered went deep, but it would be unfair to attribute them all to Ghengis Khan’s invasion, itself the climax to a long period of social and political disarray under the Khwārezm-Shahs and dating from the decline of the Seljuqs.

The Il-Khanid dynasty made Azerbaijan its centre and established Tabrīz as its first capital until Solṭānīyeh was built early in the 14th century. At first, repair and readjustment of a stricken society were complicated by the collapse of law. The caliphate, as the symbol of Muslim legality, had been eroded by ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad and by its own withdrawal into a temporal state in Iraq and the Tigris-Euphrates estuary region. But it had retained enough vitality for Sultan Muḥammad’s action in setting up an anticaliph to have alienated influential members of his subject people. After 1258 it was gone altogether, while Hülegü Khan showed considerable religious eclecticism and had, in any event, the yāsā, or tribal law, of Genghis Khan to apply as the law of the Mongol state, in opposition to, or side by side with, the Sharīʿah, the law of Islam.

The Il-Khans’ religious toleration released Christians and Jews from their restrictions under the Islamic regime. Fresh talent thus became available, but competition for new favours marred what good effects this release might have had on interfaith relations. It took time for Iranian administrators to resume their normal role after the invasion and to restore some semblance of administrative order and stability. Their process was impeded by the paganism of the new conquerors as well as by jostling for influence among classes of the conquered, not in this instance exclusively Muslim. At the same time, a shattered agrarian economy was burdened by heavy taxes, those sanctioned by the Sharīʿah being added to by those the yāsā provided for, so that the pressure of exploitation was increased by Mongol tax innovations as well as by the invaders’ cupidity.

The pressure was increased beyond the economy’s endurance: the Il-Khanid government ran into fiscal difficulties. An experiment with paper currency, modeled on the Chinese money, failed under Gaykhatu (reigned 1291–95). Gaykhatu was followed briefly by Baydu (died 1295), who was supplanted by the greatest of the Il-Khans, Maḥmūd Ghāzān (1295–1304). Ghāzān abandoned Buddhism—the faith in which his grandfather Abagha, Hülegü’s successor (1265–82), had reared him—and adopted Islam. One of his chief ministers was also his biographer, Rashīd al-Dīn, of Jewish descent. He seems deliberately to have striven to present Ghāzān, whom he styles the “emperor of Islam” (pādshāh-e eslām), as a ruler who combined the qualities and functions of both the former caliphs and ancient Iranian “great kings.”

Ghāzān made strenuous efforts to regulate taxes, encourage industry, bring wasteland into cultivation, and curb the abuses and arrogance of the military and official classes. Facilities for domestic and foreign merchants were furnished. Buildings were constructed and irrigation channels dug. Medicinal and fruit-bearing plants were imported and the cultivation of indigenous ones encouraged. Observatories were built and improved—a sure indication of concern with agricultural improvement, for seasonal planning required accurate calendars. He fostered Muslim sentiment by showing consideration for the sayyids, who claimed descent from the Prophet’s family, and it seems probable that he wished to eradicate or overlay Shīʿite-Sunni sectarian divisiveness, for Ghāzān’s Islam appears to have been designed to appeal equally to both persuasions. Any slight bias in favour of the Shīʿites might be attributed to a desire to capture the emotions and imagination of many of the humble people who had reacted against the Seljuqs’ zeal for Sunnism and craved a teaching that included millennial overtones. Shīʿism had been liberated by the fall of the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate, and its belief in the reappearance of the 12th imam, who was to inaugurate peace and justice in the world, satisfied this popular craving for religious solace.

Ghāzān’s work was carried on, but less successfully, by his successor Öljeitü (1304–16). Between 1317 and 1335, though he finally relinquished the expensive campaigns against Egypt for the opening to the Mediterranean, Abū Saʿīd was unable to keep the Il-Khanid regime consolidated, and it fell apart on his death. Ghāzān’s brilliant reign survives only in the pages of his historian, Rashīd al-Dīn. Wars against Egypt and their own Mongol kinsmen in Asia had in fact hampered the Il-Khans in accomplishing a satisfactory reintegration of an Iranian polity.

As the atabegs had done after the Seljuqs, Il-Khanid military emirs began to establish themselves as independent regional potentates after 1335. At first, two of them, formerly military chiefs in the Il-Khans’ service, competed for power in western Iran, ostensibly acting on behalf of rival Il-Khanid puppet princes. Ḥasan Küchük (the Small) of the Chūpānids was eventually defeated by Ḥasan Buzurg (the Tall) of the Jalāyirids, who set up the Jalāyirid dynasty over Iraq, Kurdistan, and Azerbaijan; it lasted from 1336 to 1432. In Fārs, Il-Khanid agents, the Injuids, after a spell of power during which Abū Isḥāq Injū had been the poet Hāfeẓ’s patron, were ousted by Abū Saʿīd’s governor of Yazd, Mubāriz al-Dīn Muẓaffar. Thus in 1353 Shīrāz became the Muẓaffarid dynasty’s capital, which it remained until conquest by Timur in 1393.

The Timurids and Turkmen

Timur (Tamerlane) claimed descent from Genghis Khan’s family. The disturbed conditions in Mongol Transoxania gave this son of a minor government agent in the town of Kesh the chance to build up a kingdom in Central Asia in the name of the Chagatai Khans, whom he eventually supplanted. He entered Iran in 1380 and in 1393 reduced the Jalāyirids after taking their capital, Baghdad. In 1402 he captured the Ottoman sultan, Bayezid I, near Ankara. He conquered Syria and then turned his attention to campaigns far to the east of his tumultuously acquired and ill-cemented empire; he died in 1405 on an expedition to China. Timur left an awesome name and an ambiguous record of flights of curiosity into the realms of unorthodox religious beliefs, history, and every kind of inquiry concerning lands and peoples. He showed interest in Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism that varied from a scholastic study of ascetic techniques for mastering the carnal self to complete abandonment of all forms of authority in the belief that faith alone is necessary for salvation. Sufism had increased in the disturbed post-Seljuq era as both the consolation and the refuge of desperate people. In Sufism Timur may have hoped to find popular leaders whom he could use for his own purposes. His encounters with such keepers of the consciences of harried, exploited, and ill-treated Iranians proved that they knew him perhaps better than he knew himself. Whatever his motives may have been, the reverse of stability was his legacy to Iran. His division of his ill-assimilated conquests among his sons served to ensure that an integrated Timurid empire would never be achieved.

The nearest a Timurid state came to being an integrated Iranian empire was under Timur’s son Shah Rokh (reigned 1405–47), who endeavoured to weld Azerbaijan and western Persia to Khorāsān and eastern Persia to form a united Timurid state for a short and troubled period. He succeeded only in loosely controlling western and southern Iran from his beautiful capital at Herāt. Azerbaijan demanded three major military expeditions from this pacific sovereign and even so could not long be held. He made Herāt the seat of a splendid culture, the atelier of great miniature painters (Behzād notable among them), and the home of a revival of Persian poetry, letters, and philosophy. This revival was not unconnected with an effort to claim for an Iranian centre once more the palm of leadership in the propagation of Sunni ideology: Herāt sent copies of Sunni canonical works on request to Egypt. The reaction, in Shīʿism’s ultimate victory under the Ṣafavid shahs of Persia, was, however, already being prepared.

Western Iran was dominated by the Kara Koyunlu, the “Black Sheep” Turkmen. In Azerbaijan they had supplanted their former masters, the Jalāyirids. Timur had put these Kara Koyunlu to flight, but in 1406 they regained their capital, Tabrīz. On Shah Rokh’s death, Jahān Shah (reigned c. 1438–67) extended Kara Koyunlu rule out of the northwest deeper into Iran at the Timurids’ expense. The Timurids relied on their old allies, the Kara Koyunlu’s rival Turkmen of the Ak Koyunlu, or “White Sheep,” clans, who had long been established at Diyarbakır in Turkey. The White Sheep acted as a curb on the Black Sheep, whose Jahān Shah was defeated by the Ak Koyunlu Uzun Ḥasan by the end of 1467.

Uzun Ḥasan (1453–78) achieved a short-lived Iranian empire and even briefly deprived the Timurids of Herāt. He was, however, confronted by a new power in Asia Minor—the Ottoman Turks. His relationship with the Christian emperor at Trebizond (Trabzon) through his Byzantine wife, Despina, involved Uzun Ḥasan in attempts to shield Trebizond from the ineluctable Ottoman advance. The Ottomans crushingly defeated him in 1473. Under his son Yaʿqūb (reigned 1478–90), the Ak Koyunlu state was subjected to fiscal reforms associated with a government-sponsored effort to reapply rigorous purist principles of Sunni Islamic rules for revenue collection. Yaʿqūb attempted to purge the state of taxes introduced under the Mongols and not sanctioned by the Muslim canon. But the inquiries made by the Sunni religious authorities antagonized the vested interests, damaged the popularity of the Ak Koyunlu regime, and discredited Sunni fanaticism.

This attempt to revive strict Sunni religious values through revenue reform or to effect the latter under the guise of religion no doubt gave impetus to the spread of Ṣafavid Shīʿite propaganda. Another factor must have been related to the same general economic decline that made Sultan Yaʿqūb’s fiscal reforms necessary in the first place. Sheikh Ḥaydar led a movement that had begun as a Sufi order under his ancestor Sheikh Ṣafī al-Dīn of Ardabīl (1253–1334). This order may be considered to have originally represented a puritanical, but not legalistically so, reaction against the sullying of Islam, the staining of Muslim lands, by the Mongol infidels. What began as a spiritual, otherworldly reaction against irreligion and the betrayal of spiritual aspirations developed into a manifestation of the Shīʿite quest for dominion over a Muslim polity. By the 15th century, the Ṣafavid movement could draw on both the mystical emotional force of Sufism and the Shīʿite appeal to the oppressed populace to gain a large number of dedicated adherents. Sheikh Ḥaydar inured his numerous followers to warfare by leading them on expeditions from Ardabīl against Christian enclaves in the nearby Caucasus. He was killed on one of these campaigns. His son Ismāʿīl was to avenge his death and lead his devoted army to a conquest of Iran whereby Iran gained a great dynasty, a Shīʿite regime, and in most essentials its shape as a modern nation-state.

Gone were the days of rule by converted and zealous Sunni Turks or by Mongols of ambiguous spiritual allegiance. Iran’s defilement was removed by the swelling tide of Shīʿism, which bore Ismāʿīl to the throne his family was to occupy without interruption until 1722, in one of the greatest epochs of Iranian history.

The Ṣafavids (1501–1736)

Shah Ismāʿīl

In 1501 Ismāʿīl I (reigned 1501–24) supplanted the Ak Koyunlu in Azerbaijan. Within a decade he gained supremacy over most of Iran as a ruler his followers regarded as divinely entitled to sovereignty. The Ṣafavids claimed descent—on grounds that modern research has shown to be dubious—from the Shīʿite imams. Muslims in Iran, therefore, could regard themselves as having found a legitimate imam-ruler, who, as a descendant of ʿAlī, required no caliph to legitimate his position. Rather, Ṣafavid political legitimacy was based on the religious order’s mixture of Sufi ecstaticism and Shīʿite extremism (Arabic ghulū), neither of which was the dusty scholasticism of the Sunni or Shīʿite legal schools. The dynasty’s military success was based both on Ismāʿīl’s skill as a leader and on the conversion of a number of Turkmen tribes—who came to be known as the Kizilbash (Turkish: “Red Heads”) for the 12-folded red caps these tribesmen wore, representing their belief in the 12 imams—to this emotionally powerful Sufi-Shīʿite syncretism. The Kizilbash became the backbone of the Ṣafavid military effort, and their virtual deification of Ismāʿīl contributed greatly to his swift military conquest of Iran. In later years, though, extremist (ghulāt) zeal and its chiliastic fervour began to undermine the orderly administration of the Ṣafavid state. Ismāʿīl’s attempt to spread Shīʿite propaganda among the Turkmen tribes of eastern Anatolia prompted a conflict with the Sunni Ottoman Empire. Following Iran’s defeat by the Ottomans at the Battle of Chaldiran, Ṣafavid expansion slowed, and a process of consolidation began in which Ismāʿīl sought to quell the more extreme expressions of faith among his followers. Such actions were largely preempted, however, by Ismāʿīl’s death in 1524 at the age of 36.

The new Iranian empire lacked the resources that had been available to the caliphs of Baghdad in former times through their dominion over Central Asia and the West: Asia Minor and Transoxania were gone, and the rise of maritime trade in the West was detrimental to a country whose wealth had depended greatly on its position on important east-west overland trade routes. The rise of the Ottomans impeded Iranian westward advances and contested with the Ṣafavids’ control over both the Caucasus and Mesopotamia. Years of warfare with the Ottomans imposed a heavy drain on the Ṣafavids’ resources. The Ottomans threatened Azerbaijan itself. Finally, in 1639 the Treaty of Qaṣr-e Shīrīn (also called the Treaty of Zuhāb) gave Yerevan in the southern Caucasus to Iran and Baghdad and all of Mesopotamia to the Ottomans.

Shah ʿAbbās I

The Ṣafavids were still faced with the problem of making their empire pay. The silk trade, over which the government held a monopoly, was a primary source of revenue. Ismāʿīl’s successor, Ṭahmāsp I (reigned 1524–76), encouraged carpet weaving on the scale of a state industry. ʿAbbās I (reigned 1588–1629) established trade contacts directly with Europe, but Iran’s remoteness from Europe, behind the imposing Ottoman screen, made maintaining and promoting these contacts difficult and sporadic. ʿAbbās also transplanted a colony of industrious and commercially astute Armenians from Jolfā in Azerbaijan to a new Jolfā adjacent to Eṣfahān, the city he developed and adorned as his capital. The Ṣafavids had earlier moved their capital from the vulnerable Tabrīz to Qazvīn. After eliminating the Uzbek menace from east of the Caspian Sea in 1598–99, ʿAbbās could move his capital south to Eṣfahān, more centrally placed than Qazvīn for control over the whole country and for communication with the trade outlets of the Persian Gulf. ʿAbbās engaged English help to oust the Portuguese from the island of Hormuz in 1622. He also strove to lodge Ṣafavid power strongly in Khorāsān. There, at Mashhad, he developed the shrine of ʿAlī al-Riḍā, the eighth Shīʿite imam, as a pilgrimage centre to rival Shīʿite holy places in Mesopotamia, where visiting pilgrims took currency out of Ṣafavid and into Ottoman territory.

Under ʿAbbās, Iran prospered. The monarch continued the policy begun under his predecessors of eradicating the old Sufi bands and ghulāt extremists whose support had been crucial in building the state. The Kizilbash were replaced by a standing army of slave soldiers loyal only to the shah, who were trained and equipped on European lines with the advice of the English adventurer Robert Sherley. Sherley was versed in artillery tactics and, accompanied by a party of cannon founders, reached Qazvīn with his brother Anthony in 1598. The bureaucracy, too, was carefully reorganized, but the seeds of the sovereignty’s weakness lay in the royal house itself, which lacked an established system of inheritance by primogeniture. A reigning shah’s nearest and most acute objects of suspicion were his own sons. Among them, brother plotted against brother over who should succeed on their father’s death. Intriguers, ambitious for influence in a subsequent reign, supported one prince against another. ʿAbbās did not adopt the Ottoman sultans’ practice of eliminating royal males by murder (as a child he had been within a hair’s breadth of being a victim of such a policy). Instead, he instituted the practice of immuring infant princes in palace gardens away from the promptings of intrigue and the world at large. As a result, his successors tended to be indecisive men, easily dominated by powerful dignitaries among the Shīʿite ʿulamāʾ—whom the shahs themselves had urged to move in large numbers from the shrine cities of Iraq in an attempt to bolster Ṣafavid legitimacy as an orthodox Shīʿite dynasty.

The Afghan interlude

Ḥusayn I (reigned 1694–1722) was of a pious temperament and was especially influenced by the Shīʿite divines, whose conflicting advice, added to his own procrastination, sealed the sudden and unexpected fate of the Ṣafavid empire. One Maḥmūd, a former Ṣafavid vassal in Afghanistan, captured Eṣfahān and murdered Ḥusayn in his cell in the beautiful madrasah (religious school) built in his mother’s name.

The Afghan interlude was disastrous for Iran. In 1723 the Ottomans, partly to secure more territory and partly to forestall Russian aspirations in the Caucasus, took advantage of the disintegration of the Ṣafavid realm and invaded from the west, ravaging western Persia. Nādr, an Afshārid Turkmen from northern Khorāsān, was eventually able to reunite Iran, a process he began on behalf of the Ṣafavid prince Ṭahmāsp II (reigned 1722–32), who had escaped the Afghans. After Nādr had cleared the country of Afghans, Ṭahmāsp made him governor of a large area of eastern Iran.

Religious developments

As in the case of the early Sunni caliphate, Ṣafavid rule had been based originally on both political and religious legitimacy, with the shah being both king and divine representative. With the later erosion of Ṣafavid central political authority in the mid-17th century, the power of the Shīʿite clergy in civil affairs—as judges, administrators, and court functionaries—began to grow, in a way unprecedented in Shīʿite history. Likewise, the ʿulamāʾ began to take a more active role in agitating against Sufism and other forms of popular religion, which remained strong in Iran, and in enforcing a more scholarly type of Shīʿism among the masses. The development of the taʿziyyah—a passion play commemorating the martyrdom of al-Ḥusayn and his family—and the practice of visits to the shrines and tombs of local Shīʿite leaders began during this period, largely at the prompting of the Shīʿite clergy.

These activities coincided with an escalated debate between Shīʿite scholars in Iran and Iraq over the role played by the clergy in interpreting Islamic precepts. One faction felt that the only sound source of legal interpretation was the direct teachings of the 12 infallible imams, in the form of their written and oral testaments (Arabic akhbār, hence the name of the sect: the Akhbāriyyah). Their opponents, known as the Uṣūliyyah, held that a number of fundamental sources (uṣūl) should be consulted but that the final source for legal conclusions rested in the reasoned judgment of a qualified scholar, a mujtahid. The eventual victory of the Uṣūliyyah in this debate during the turbulent years at the end of the Ṣafavid empire was to have resounding effects on both the shape of Shīʿism and the course of Iranian history. The study of legal theory (fiqh), the purview of the mujtahids, became the primary field of scholarship in the Shīʿite world, and the rise of the mujtahids as a distinctive body signaled the development of a politically conscious and influential religious class not previously seen in Islamic history.

This rising legalism also facilitated the implementation of a theory that was first voiced in the mid-16th century by the scholars ʿAlī al-Karakī and Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī, which called for the clergy to act as a general representative (nāʾib al-ʿamm) of the Hidden Imam during his absence, performing such duties as administering the poor tax (zakāt) and income tax (khums, “one-fifth”), leading prayer, and running Sharīʿah courts. A strong Ṣafavid state and the presence of influential Akhbārī scholars at first managed to suppress the execution of these ideas, but the complete collapse of central authority in Iran during the 18th century accelerated the already considerable involvement of the clerisy in state and civil affairs, a trend that would continue until modern times.

Nādir Shah (1736–47)

Nādr later dethroned Ṭahmāsp II in favour of the latter’s son, the more pliant ʿAbbās III. His successful military exploits, however, which included victories over rebels in the Caucasus, made it feasible for this stern warrior himself to be proclaimed monarch—as Nādir Shah—in 1736. He attempted to mollify Persian-Ottoman hostility by establishing in Iran a less aggressive form of Shīʿism, which would be less offensive to Ottoman sensibilities; but this experiment did not take root. Nādir Shah’s need for money drove him to embark on his celebrated Indian campaign in 1738–39. His capture of Delhi and of the Mughal emperor’s treasure gave Nādir booty in such quantities that he was able to exempt Iran from taxes for three years. His Indian expedition temporarily solved the problem of how to make his empire financially viable.

How large this problem loomed in Nādir Shah’s mind is demonstrated by his increasingly morbid obsession with treasure and jewels. After suspecting his son of complicity in a plot against him in 1741, Nādir Shah’s mind seems to have become unhinged; his brilliance and courage deteriorated into a meanness and capricious cruelty that could no longer be tolerated. In 1747 he was murdered by a group of his own Afshārid tribesmen, together with some Qājār chiefs—a sad end to one of Iran’s greatest leaders.

Nādir had been the first modern Iranian leader to perceive the importance of having his own navy, and in 1734 he had appointed an “admiral of the gulf.” Ships were purchased from their British captains, and by 1735 the new Iranian navy had attacked Al-Baṣrah. What really mattered, however, were the land forces. Nādir Shah’s reign exemplified the fact that, to be successful, a shah of Iran had to prove himself capable of defending his realm’s territorial integrity and of extending its sources of wealth and production by conquest. To these ends, Nādir Shah built up a large army composed of tribal units under their own chiefs, such as his Afshārid kinsmen and the Qājār and Bakhtyārī.

But on Nādir Shah’s death his great military machine dispersed, its commanders bent on establishing their own states. Aḥmad Shah Durrānī founded a kingdom in Afghanistan based in Kandahār. Shah Rokh, Nādir Shah’s blind grandson, succeeded in maintaining himself at the head of an Afshārid state in Khorāsān, its capital at Mashhad. The Qājār chief Muḥammad Ḥasan took Māzanderān south of the Caspian Sea. Āzād Khan, an Afghan, held Azerbaijan, whence Moḥammad Ḥasan Khan Qājār ultimately expelled him. The Qājār chief, therefore, disposed of this post-Nādir Shah Afghan remnant in northwestern Iran but was himself unable to make headway against a new power arising in central and southern Iran, that of the Zands.

The Zand dynasty (1750–79)

Muḥammad Karīm Khan Zand entered into an alliance with the Bakhtyārī chief ʿAlī Mardān Khan in an effort to seize Eṣfahān—then the political centre of Iran—from Shah Rokh’s vassal, Abū al-Fatḥ Bakhtyārī. Once this goal was achieved, Karīm Khan and ʿAlī Mardān agreed that Shah Sulṭān Ḥusayn Ṣafavī’s grandson, a boy named Abū Ṭurāb, should be proclaimed Shah Ismāʿīl III in order to cement popular support for their joint rule. The two also agreed that the popular Abū al-Fatḥ would retain his position as governor of Eṣfahān, ʿAlī Mardān Khan would act as regent over the young puppet, and Karīm Khan would take to the field in order to regain lost Ṣafavid territory. ʿAlī Mardān Khan, however, broke the compact and was killed by Karīm Khan, who gained supremacy over central and southern Iran and reigned as regent or deputy (vakīl) on behalf of the powerless Ṣafavid prince, never arrogating to himself the title of shah. Karīm Khan made Shīrāz his capital and did not contend with Shah Rokh (reigned 1748–95) for the hegemony of Khorāsān. He concentrated on Fārs and the centre but managed to contain the Qājār in Māzanderān, north of the Elburz Mountains. He kept Āghā Muḥammad Khan Qājār a hostage at his court in Shīrāz, after repulsing Muḥammad Ḥasan Qājār’s bids for extended dominion.

Karīm Khan’s geniality and common sense inaugurated a period of peace and popular contentment, and he strove for commercial prosperity in Shīrāz, a centre accessible to the Persian Gulf ports and trade with India. After Karīm Khan’s death in 1779, Āghā Muḥammad Khan escaped to the Qājār tribal country in the north, gathered a large force, and embarked on a war of conquest.

The Qājār dynasty (1796–1925)

Between 1779 and 1789 the Zands fought among themselves over their legacy. In the end it fell to the gallant Loṭf ʿAlī, the Zands’ last hope. Āghā Muḥammad Khan relentlessly hunted him down until he overcame and killed him at the southeastern city of Kermān in 1794. In 1796 Āghā Muḥammad Khan assumed the imperial diadem, and later in the same year he took Mashhad. Shah Rokh died of the tortures inflicted on him to make him reveal the complete tally of the Afshārids’ treasure. Āghā Muḥammad was cruel and he was avaricious.

Karīm Khan’s commercial efforts were nullified by his successors’ quarrels. With cruel irony, attempts to revive the Persian Gulf trade were followed by a British mission from India in 1800, which ultimately opened the way for a drain of Persian bullion to India. This drain was made inevitable by the damage done to Iran’s productive capacity during Āghā Muḥammad Khan’s campaigns to conquer the country.

The age of imperialism

Fatḥ ʿAlī Shah (reigned 1797–1834), in need of revenue after decades of devastating warfare, relied on British subsidies to cover his government’s expenditures. Following a series of wars, he lost the Caucasus to Russia by the treaties of Golestān in 1813 and Turkmanchay (Torkmān Chāy) in 1828, the latter of which granted Russian commercial and consular agents access to Iran. This began a diplomatic rivalry between Russia and Britain—with Iran the ultimate victim—that resulted in the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention giving each side exclusive spheres of influence in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tibet.

The growth of European influence in Iran and the establishment of new transportation systems between Europe and the Middle East were followed by an unprecedented increase in trade that ultimately changed the way of life in both urban and rural areas of Iran. As with other semicolonized countries of this era, Iran became a source of cheap raw materials and a market for industrial goods from Western countries. A sharp drop in the export of manufactured commodities was accompanied by a significant rise in the export of raw materials such as opium, rice, tobacco, and nuts. This rapid change made the country more vulnerable to global market fluctuations and, because of an increase in acreage devoted to nonfood export crops, periodic famine. Simultaneously, in an effort to increase revenue, Qājār leaders sold large tracts of state-owned lands to private owners—most of whom were large merchants—subsequently disrupting traditional forms of land tenure and production and adversely affecting the economy.

Hājjī Mīrzā Āghāsī, a minister of Moḥammad Shah (reigned 1834–48), tried to activate the government to revive sources of production and to cement ties with lesser European powers, such as Spain and Belgium, as an alternative to Anglo-Russian dominance, but little was achieved. Nāṣer al-Dīn Shah (reigned 1848–96) made Iran’s last effort to regain Herāt, but British intervention in 1856–57 thwarted his efforts. Popular and religious antagonism to the Qājār regime increased as Nāṣer al-Dīn strove to raise funds by granting foreign companies and individuals exclusive concessions over Iranian import and export commodities and natural resources in exchange for lump cash payments. The money paid for concessions was ostensibly for developing Iran’s resources but instead was squandered by the court and on the shah’s lavish trips to Europe.

Popular protest and the Constitutional Revolution

In 1890 Nāṣer al-Dīn Shah granted a nationwide concession over the sale and importation of tobacco products to a British citizen. However, popular protest compelled Nāṣer al-Dīn to cancel the concession, demonstrating several factors of crucial significance for the years to come: first, that there existed in Iran a mercantile class of sufficient influence to make use of such broad, popular sentiment and, second, that such public outpourings of discontent could limit the scope of the shah’s power. More important, the protest demonstrated the growing power of the Shīʿite clergy, members of which had played a crucial role in rallying Iranians against the monopoly and which was to have great influence over political changes to come.

The “Tobacco Riots”—as this episode came to be known—were a prelude to the Constitutional Revolution that was to occur in the reign of Moẓaffar al-Dīn Shah (1896–1907), during a time when the country suffered deep economic problems associated with its integration into a world economy. Iran had remained on the silver standard after most countries had left bimetallism for a gold standard in the late 1860s. Silver values in Iran slipped from the 1870s onward, and silver bullion drained out of the country, which lead to high rates of inflation and to bread riots. Further, in 1898 the government retained a foreign adviser to restructure the Customs Bureau. That action increased government revenue but alarmed Iranian merchants who feared further tax increases, including a substantial land tax. Merchants and landowners appealed for help to the ʿulamāʾ, with whom they had traditionally maintained close ties. Many of the clergy had themselves become increasingly hostile to the Qājār regime because the clerics had become indignant over government interference in spheres that traditionally were administered by the clergy (such as the courts and education) and over fears that the government might tax vaqf land (mortmain, administered by the clergy). In a trend begun in the Ṣafavid period, a number of influential mujtahids began to concern themselves with matters of government, to the point of questioning the regime’s legitimacy. Even the shahs’ earlier suppression of the Bābī and Bahāʾī movements, viewed as heresy by the majority of the Shīʿite establishment, failed to ingratiate the regime with the ʿulamāʾ. Together these groups—ʿulamāʾ, merchants, and landowners—began to criticize the privileges and protections accorded to European merchants and called for political and legal reforms.

At the same time, Iran was increasingly interacting with the West. This contact sparked an interest in democratic institutions among the members of a nascent intellectual class, which itself was a product of new, Western-style schools promoted by the shah. Encouraged by the Russian Revolution of 1905 and influenced by immigrant workers and merchants from Russian-controlled areas of Transcaucasia, the new Iranian intellectuals were, paradoxically, to find common cause with Iran’s merchants and Shīʿite clergy.

All aggrieved parties found an opportunity for social reform in 1905–06 when a series of demonstrations, held in protest over the government beating of several merchants, escalated into strikes that soon adjourned to a shrine near Tehrān, which the demonstrators claimed as a bast (Persian: “sanctuary”). While under this traditional Iranian form of sanctuary, the government was unable to arrest or otherwise molest the demonstrators, and a series of such sanctuary protests over subsequent months, combined with wide-scale general strikes of craftsmen and merchants, forced the ailing shah to grant a constitution in 1906. The first National Consultative Assembly (the Majles) was opened in October of that year. The new constitution provided a framework for secular legislation, a new judicial code, and a free press. All these reduced the power of the royal court and religious authorities and placed more authority in the hands of the Majles, which, in turn, took a strong stand against European intervention.

Although the Majles was suppressed in 1908 under Moḥammad ʿAlī Shah (ruled 1907–09) by the officers of the Persian Cossack Brigade—the shah’s bodyguard and the most effective military force in the country at the time—democracy was revived the following year under the second Majles, and Moḥammad ʿAlī fled to Russia. Constitutionalists also executed the country’s highest-ranking cleric, Sheikh Faẓlullāh Nūrī, who had been found guilty by a reformist tribunal of plotting to overthrow the new order—an indication that not all of Iran’s religious elite were proponents of reform. In addition, as part of the secular reforms introduced by the Majles, a variety of secular schools were established during that time, including some for girls, causing significant tension between sections of the clergy that had previously advocated reform and their erstwhile intellectual allies.

The end of the Majles, however, did not come as a result of internal strife. In an attempt to come to grips with Iran’s ongoing financial problems, the Majles in 1911 hired another foreign financial adviser, this time an American, William Morgan Shuster, who advocated bold moves to collect revenue throughout the country. This action angered both the Russians and British, who claimed limited sovereignty in the respective spheres of influence the two powers had carved out of Iran in 1907 (the Russians in northern Iran and the Caucasus and the British along the Persian Gulf). The Russians issued an ultimatum demanding Shuster’s dismissal. When the Majles refused, Russian troops advanced toward Tehrān, and the regent of the young Aḥmad Shah (reigned 1909–25) hastily dismissed Shuster and dissolved the Majles in December 1911.

Rise of Reza Khan

Until the beginning of World War I, Russia effectively ruled Iran, but, with the outbreak of hostilities, Russian troops withdrew from the north of the country, and Iranians convened the third Majles. Jubilation was short-lived, however, as the country quickly turned into a battlefield between British, German, Russian, and Turkish forces. The landed elite hoped to find in Germany a foil for the British and Russians, but change eventually was to come from the north.

Following the Russian Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the new Soviet government unilaterally canceled the tsarist concessions in Iran, an action that created tremendous goodwill toward the new Soviet Union and, after the Central Powers were defeated, left Britain the sole Great Power in Iran. In 1919 the Majles, after much internal wrangling, refused a British offer of military and financial aid that effectively would have made Iran into a protectorate of Britain. The British were initially loath to withdraw from Iran but caved to international pressure and removed their advisers by 1921. In that same year British diplomats lent their support to an Iranian officer of the Persian Cossack Brigade, Reza Khan, who in the previous year had been instrumental in putting down a rebellion led by Mīrzā Kūchak Khan, who had sought to form an independent Soviet-style republic in Iran’s northern province of Gīlān. In collaboration with a political writer, Sayyid Ziya al-Din Tabatabaʾi, Reza Khan staged a coup in 1921 and took control of all military forces in Iran. Between 1921 and 1925 Reza Khan—first as war minister and later as prime minister under Aḥmad Shah—built an army that was loyal solely to him. He also managed to forge political order in a country that for years had known nothing but turmoil. Initially Reza Khan wished to declare himself president in the style of Turkey’s secular nationalist president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—a move fiercely opposed by the Shīʿite ʿulamāʾ—but instead he deposed the weak Aḥmad Shah in 1925 and had himself crowned Reza Shah Pahlavi.

The Pahlavi dynasty (1925–79)

Reza Shah

During the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi, educational and judicial reforms were effected that laid the basis of a modern state and reduced the influence of the religious classes. A wide range of legal affairs that had previously been the purview of Shīʿite religious courts were now either administered by secular courts or overseen by state bureaucracies, and, as a result, the status of women improved. The custom of women wearing veils was banned, the minimum age for marriage was raised, and strict religious divorce laws (which invariably favoured the husband) were made more equitable. The number and availability of secular schools increased for both boys and girls, and the University of Tehrān was established in 1934, further eroding what had once been a clerical monopoly on education. Nonetheless, Reza Shah was selective on what forms of modernization and secularization he would adopt. He banned trade unions and political parties and firmly muzzled the press. Oil concessions were first granted in 1901, during the Qājār period, and the first commercially exploitable petroleum deposits were found in 1908. Reza Shah renegotiated a number of these concessions, despite the ire these agreements raised among the Iranian people. The concessions were to remain a violent point of contention in Iran for decades to come.

Reza Shah’s need to expand trade, his fear of Soviet control over Iran’s overland routes to Europe, and his apprehension at renewed Soviet and continued British presence in Iran drove him to expand trade with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. His refusal to abandon what he considered to be obligations to numerous Germans in Iran served as a pretext for an Anglo-Soviet invasion of his country in 1941. Intent on ensuring the safe passage of U.S. war matériel to the Soviet Union through Iran, the Allies forced Reza Shah to abdicate, placing his young son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi on the throne.

Wartime and nationalization of oil

Mohammad Reza Shah succeeded to the throne in a country occupied by foreign powers, crippled by wartime inflation, and politically fragmented. Paradoxically, however, the war and occupation had brought a greater degree of economic activity, freedom of the press, and political openness than had been possible under Reza Shah. Many political parties were formed in this period, including the pro-British National Will and the pro-Soviet Tūdeh (“Masses”) parties. These, along with a fledgling trade union movement, challenged the power of the young shah, who did not wield the absolute authority of his father. At the same time, the abdication of Reza Shah had strengthened conservative clerical factions, which had chafed under that leader’s program of secularization.

Following the war, a loose coalition of nationalists, clerics, and noncommunist left-wing parties, known as the National Front, coalesced under Mohammad Mosaddeq, a career politician and lawyer who wished to reduce the powers of the monarchy and the clergy in Iran. Most important, the National Front, angered by years of foreign exploitation, wanted to regain control of Iran’s natural resources, and, when Mosaddeq became prime minister in 1951, he immediately nationalized the country’s oil industry. Britain, the main benefactor of Iranian oil concessions, imposed an economic embargo on Iran and pressed the International Court of Justice to consider the matter. The court, however, decided not to intervene, thereby tacitly lending its support to Iran.

Despite this apparent success, Mosaddeq was under both domestic and international pressure. British leaders Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden pushed for a joint U.S.-British coup to oust Mosaddeq, and the election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the United States in November 1952 bolstered those inside the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who wished to support such an action.

Within Iran, Mosaddeq’s social democratic policies, as well as the growth of the communist Tūdeh Party, weakened the always-tenuous support of his few allies among Iran’s religious class, whose ability to generate public support was important to Mosaddeq’s government. In August 1953, following a round of political skirmishing, Mosaddeq’s quarrels with the shah came to a head, and the Iranian monarch fled the country. Almost immediately, despite still-strong public support, the Mosaddeq government buckled during a coup funded by the CIA. Within a week of his departure, Mohammad Reza Shah returned to Iran and appointed a new prime minister.

Nationalization under Mosaddeq had failed, and after 1954 a Western multinational consortium led by British Petroleum accelerated Iranian oil development. The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) embarked on a thorough expansion of its oil-production capacities. NIOC also formed a petrochemical subsidiary and concluded agreements, mainly on the basis of equal shares, with several international companies for oil exploitation outside the area of the consortium’s operations.

Petroleum revenues were to fuel Iran’s economy for the next quarter of a century. There was no further talk of nationalization, as the shah firmly squelched subsequent political dissent within Iran. In 1957, with the aid of U.S. and Israeli intelligence services, the shah’s government formed a special branch to monitor domestic dissidents. The shah’s secret police—the Organization of National Security and Information, Sāzmān-e Amniyyat va Ettelaʿāt-e Keshvār, known by the acronym SAVAK—developed into an omnipresent force within Iranian society and became a symbol of the fear by which the Pahlavi regime was to dominate Iran.

The White Revolution

The period 1960–63 marked a turning point in the development of the Iranian state. Industrial expansion was promoted by the Pahlavi regime, while political parties that resisted the shah’s absolute consolidation of power were silenced and pushed to the margins. In 1961 the shah dissolved the 20th Majles and cleared the way for the land reform law of 1962. Under this program, the landed minority was forced to give up ownership of vast tracts of land for redistribution to small-scale cultivators. The former landlords were compensated for their loss in the form of shares of state-owned Iranian industries. Cultivators and workers were also given a share in industrial and agricultural profits, and cooperatives began to replace the large landowners in rural areas as sources of capital for irrigation, agrarian maintenance, and development.

The land reforms were a mere prelude to the shah’s “White Revolution,” a far more ambitious program of social, political, and economic reform. Put to a plebiscite and ratified in 1963, these reforms eventually redistributed land to some 2.5 million families, established literacy and health corps to benefit Iran’s rural areas, further reduced the autonomy of tribal groups, and advanced social and legal reforms that furthered the emancipation and enfranchisement of women. In subsequent decades, per capita income for Iranians skyrocketed, and oil revenue fueled an enormous increase in state funding for industrial development projects.

Protest and failure

The new policies of the shah did not go unopposed, however; many Shīʿite leaders criticized the White Revolution, holding that liberalization laws concerning women were against Islamic values. More important, the shah’s reforms chipped away at the traditional bases of clerical power. The development of secular courts had already reduced clerical power over law and jurisprudence, and the reforms’ emphasis on secular education further eroded the former monopoly of the ʿulamāʾ in that field. (Paradoxically, the White Revolution’s Literacy Corps was to be the only reform implemented by the shah to survive the Islamic revolution, because of its intense popularity.) Most pertinent to clerical independence, land reforms initiated the breakup of huge areas previously held under charitable trust (vaqf). These lands were administered by members of the ʿulamāʾ and formed a considerable portion of that class’s revenue.

In 1963 a relatively obscure member of the ʿulamāʾ named Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini—a professor of philosophy at the Fayẕiyyeh Madrasah in Qom who was accorded the honorific ayatollah—spoke out harshly against the White Revolution’s reforms. In response, the government sacked the school, killing several students, and arrested Khomeini. He was later exiled, arriving in Turkey, Iraq, and, eventually, France. During his years of exile, Khomeini stayed in intimate contact with his colleagues in Iran and completed his religio-political doctrine of velāyat-e faqīh (Persian: “governance of the jurist”), which provided the theoretical underpinnings for a Shīʿite Islamic state run by the clergy.

Land reform, however, was soon in trouble. The government was unable to put in place a comprehensive support system and infrastructure that replaced the role of the landowner, who had previously provided tenants with all the basic necessities for farming. The result was a high failure rate for new farms and a subsequent flight of agricultural workers and farmers to the country’s major cities, particularly Tehrān, where a booming construction industry promised employment. The extended family, the traditional support system in Middle Eastern culture, deteriorated as increasing numbers of young Iranians crowded into the country’s largest cities, far from home and in search of work, only to be met by high prices, isolation, and poor living conditions.

Foreign relations

Domestic reform and industrial development after 1961 were accompanied by an independent national policy in foreign relations, the principles of which were support for the United Nations (UN) and peaceful coexistence with Iran’s neighbours. The latter of these principles stressed a positive approach in cementing mutually beneficial ties with other countries. Iran played a major role with Turkey and Pakistan in the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD). It also embarked on trade and cultural relations with France, West Germany, Scandinavia, eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union.

Relations with the United States remained close, reflected by the increasing predominance of Western culture in the country and the growing number of American advisers, who were necessary to administer the shah’s ambitious economic reforms and, most important, to aid in the development of Iran’s military. The Iranian army was the cornerstone of the country’s foreign policy and had become, thanks to American aid and expertise, the most powerful, well-equipped force in the region and one of the largest armed forces in the world.

The growth of social discontent

Petroleum revenues continued to fuel Iran’s economy in the 1970s, and in 1973 Iran concluded a new 20-year oil agreement with the consortium of Western firms led by British Petroleum. This agreement gave direct control of Iranian oil fields to the government under the auspices of the NIOC and initiated a standard seller-buyer relationship between the NIOC and the oil companies. The shah was acutely aware of the danger of depending on a diminishing oil asset and pursued a policy of economic diversification. Iran had begun automobile production in the 1950s and by the early 1970s was exporting motor vehicles to Egypt and Yugoslavia. The government exploited the country’s copper reserves, and in 1972 Iran’s first steel mill began producing structural steel. Iran also invested heavily overseas and continued to press for barter agreements for the marketing of its petroleum and natural gas.

This apparent success, however, veiled deep-seated problems. World monetary instability and fluctuations in Western oil consumption seriously threatened an economy that had been rapidly expanding since the early 1950s and that was still directed on a vast scale toward high-cost development programs and large military expenditures. A decade of extraordinary economic growth, heavy government spending, and a boom in oil prices led to high rates of inflation, and—despite an elevated level of employment, held artificially high by loans and credits—the buying power of Iranians and their overall standard of living stagnated. Prices skyrocketed as supply failed to keep up with demand, and a 1975 government-sponsored war on high prices resulted in arrests and fines of traders and manufacturers, injuring confidence in the market. The agricultural sector, poorly managed in the years since land reform, continued to decline in productivity.

The shah’s reforms also had failed completely to provide any degree of political participation. The sole political outlet within Iran was the rubber-stamp Majles, dominated since the time of Mosaddeq by two parties, both of which were subservient to and sponsored by the shah. Traditional parties such as the National Front had been marginalized, while others, such as the Tūdeh Party, were outlawed and forced to operate covertly. Protest all too often took the form of subversive and violent activity by groups such as the Mojāhedīn-e Khalq and Fedāʾīyān-e Khalq, organizations with both Marxist and religious tendencies. All forms of social and political protest, either from the intellectual left or the religious right, were subject to censorship, surveillance, or harassment by SAVAK, and illegal detention and torture were common.

Many argued that since Iran’s brief experiment with parliamentary democracy and communist politics had failed, the country had to go back to its indigenous culture. The 1953 coup against Mosaddeq had particularly incensed the intellectuals. For the first time in more than half a century, the secular intellectuals, many of whom were fascinated by the populist appeal of Ayatollah Khomeini, abandoned their project of reducing the authority and power of the Shīʿite ʿulamāʾ and argued that, with the help of the clerics, the shah could be overthrown.

In this environment, members of the National Front, the Tūdeh Party, and their various splinter groups now joined the ʿulamāʾ in a broad opposition to the shah’s regime. Khomeini had continued to preach in exile about the evils of the Pahlavi regime, accusing the shah of irreligion and subservience to foreign powers. Thousands of tapes and print copies of the ayatollah’s speeches were smuggled back into Iran during the 1970s as an increasing number of unemployed and working-poor Iranians—mostly new immigrants from the countryside, who were disenchanted by the cultural vacuum of modern urban Iran—turned to the ʿulamāʾ for guidance. The shah’s dependence on the United States, his close ties with Israel—then engaged in extended hostilities with the overwhelmingly Muslim Arab states—and his regime’s ill-considered economic policies served to fuel the potency of dissident rhetoric with the masses.

The Islamic republic

The Iranian Revolution, 1978–79

Outwardly, with a swiftly expanding economy and a rapidly modernizing infrastructure, everything was going well in Iran. But in little more than a generation, Iran had changed from a traditional, conservative, and rural society to one that was industrial, modern, and urban. The sense that in both agriculture and industry too much had been attempted too soon and that the government, either through corruption or incompetence, had failed to deliver all that was promised was manifested in demonstrations against the regime in 1978.

In January 1978, incensed by what they considered to be slanderous remarks made against Khomeini in a Tehrān newspaper, thousands of young madrasah students took to the streets. They were followed by thousands more Iranian youth—mostly unemployed recent immigrants from the countryside—who began protesting the regime’s excesses. The shah, weakened by cancer and stunned by the sudden outpouring of hostility against him, vacillated, assuming the protests to be part of an international conspiracy against him. Many people were killed by government forces in the ensuing chaos, serving only to fuel the violence in a Shīʿite country where martyrdom played a fundamental role in religious expression. Despite all government efforts, a cycle of violence began in which each death fueled further protest, and all protest—from the secular left and religious right—became subsumed under the cloak of Shīʿite Islam.

During his exile, Khomeini coordinated this upsurge of opposition—first from Iraq and after 1978 from France—demanding the shah’s abdication. In January 1979, in what was officially described as a “vacation,” he and his family fled Iran; he died the following year in Cairo.

The Regency Council established to run the country during the shah’s absence proved unable to function, and Prime Minister Shahpur Bakhtiar, hastily appointed by the shah before his departure, was incapable of effecting compromise with either his former National Front colleagues or Khomeini. Crowds in excess of a million demonstrated in Tehrān, proving the wide appeal of Khomeini, who arrived in Iran amid wild rejoicing on February 1. Ten days later Bakhtiar went into hiding, eventually to find exile in France, where he was assassinated in 1991.

Postrevolutionary chaos

On April 1, following overwhelming support in a national referendum, Khomeini declared Iran an Islamic republic. Elements within the clergy promptly moved to exclude their former left-wing, nationalist, and intellectual allies from any positions of power in the new regime, and a return to conservative social values was enforced. The family protection act, which provided further guarantees and rights to women in marriage, was declared void, and mosque-based revolutionary bands known as komītehs (Persian: “committees”) patrolled the streets enforcing Islamic codes of dress and behaviour and dispatching impromptu justice to perceived enemies of the revolution. Throughout most of 1979 the Revolutionary Guards—then an informal religious militia formed by Khomeini to forestall another CIA-backed coup as in the days of Mosaddeq—engaged in similar activity, aimed at intimidating and repressing political groups not under control of the ruling Revolutionary Council and its sister Islamic Republican Party, both clerical organizations loyal to Khomeini. The violence and brutality often exceeded that of SAVAK under the shah.

The militias and the clerics they supported made every effort to suppress Western cultural influence, and, facing persecution and violence, many of the Western-educated elite fled the country. This anti-Western sentiment eventually manifested itself in the November 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy by a group of Iranian protesters demanding the extradition of the shah, who at that time was undergoing medical treatment in the United States. Through the embassy takeover, Khomeini’s supporters could claim to be as “anti-imperialist” as the political left. This ultimately gave them the ability to suppress most of the regime’s left-wing and moderate opponents. The Assembly of Experts (Majles-e Khobregān), overwhelmingly dominated by clergy, ratified a new constitution the following month. Taking 66 U.S. citizens hostage at their embassy proved to highlight the fractures that had begun to occur within the revolutionary regime itself. Moderates, such as provisional Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and the republic’s first president, Abolhasan Bani-Sadr, who opposed holding the hostages, were steadily forced from power by conservatives within the government who questioned their revolutionary zeal.

The Iran-Iraq War (1980–88)

The new constitution created a religious government based on Khomeini’s vision of velāyat-e faqīh and gave sweeping powers to the rahbar, or leader; the first rahbar was Khomeini himself. Despite the regime’s political consolidation, several new threats manifested themselves. The most significant of these was the eight-year period of armed conflict during the Iran-Iraq War.

In September 1980 a long-standing border dispute served as a pretext for Iraqi President Ṣaddām Ḥussein to launch an invasion of Iran’s southwestern province of Khūzestān, one of the country’s most important oil-producing regions and one populated by many ethnic Arabs. Iran’s formidable armed forces had played an important role in ensuring regional stability under the shah but had virtually dissolved after the collapse of the monarch’s regime. The weakened military proved to be unexpectedly resilient in the face of the Iraqi assault, however, and, despite initial losses, achieved remarkable defensive success.

The Iraqis also provided support to the Mojāhedīn-e Khalq, now headquartered in Iraq. The Mojāhedīn launched a campaign of sporadic and highly demoralizing bombings throughout Iran that killed many clerics and government leaders. In June 1981 a dissident Islamist faction (apparently unrelated to the Mojāhedīn) bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republican Party, killing a number of leading clerics. Government pressure intensified after the bombing, and Bani-Sadr (who had earlier gone into hiding to avoid arrest) and Massoud Rajavi, the head of the Mojāhedīn, fled the country. The new president, Mohammad Ali Rajaʾi, and Prime Minister Mohammad Javad Bahonar died in another bombing in August. These attacks led to an unrelenting campaign of repression and executions by the Revolutionary Guards, often based on trivial allegations, to root out subversion. Allegations of torture, poor prison conditions, arbitrary arrests, and the denial of basic human rights proliferated, as did accusations that condemned female prisoners were raped—purportedly forced into temporary marriages (known as mutʿah) with their guards before execution.

By the summer of 1982, Iraq’s initial territorial gains had been recaptured by Iranian troops who were stiffened with Revolutionary Guards. It also became apparent that young boys, often plucked from the streets, were leading human wave assaults on the front lines, thereby sacrificing their bodies to clear minefields for the troops that followed. These tactics eventually enabled Iran to capture small amounts of Iraqi territory, but the war soon lapsed into stalemate and attrition. In addition, its length caused anxiety among the Arab states and the international community because it posed a potential threat to the oil-producing countries of the Persian Gulf. The civilian populations of both Iran and Iraq suffered severely as military operations moved to bombing population centres and industrial targets, particularly oil refineries. Attacks on oil tankers from both sides greatly curtailed shipping in the gulf.

Finally, in July 1988, after a series of Iraqi offensives during which that country recaptured virtually all of its lost territory, Khomeini announced Iran’s acceptance of a UN resolution that required both sides to withdraw to their respective borders and observe a cease-fire, which came into force in August.

The cease-fire redirected attention to long-standing factional conflicts over economic, social, and foreign policy objectives that had arisen between several groups in Iran’s government. “Conservatives” favoured less government control of the economy, while “leftists” sought greater economic socialization. These two blocs, both committed to social and religious conservatism, were increasingly challenged by a “pragmatist” or “reformist” bloc. The latter favoured steps to normalize relations with the West, ease strict social restrictions, and open up the country’s political system as the only solution to their country’s crushing economic and social problems, deeply exacerbated by eight years of war.

Domestic affairs and internal reform

Change began in short order, when the Assembly of Experts appointed President Ali Khamenei rahbar following the death of Khomeini in June 1989. The following month elections were held to select Khamenei’s replacement as president. Running virtually unopposed, Hojatoleslām Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaker of the Majles since 1980, was elected by an overwhelming vote. Rafsanjani, whose cabinet choices represented the various factions, immediately began the process of rebuilding the war-torn economy. Considered a pragmatist and one of the most powerful men in Iran, Rafsanjani favoured a policy of economic liberalization, privatization of industry, and rapprochement with the West that would encourage much-needed foreign investment. The new president’s policies were opposed by both Khamenei and the conservative parliament, and attempts by conservative elements to stifle reforms by harassing and imprisoning political dissidents frequently resulted in demonstrations and violent protest, which were often brutally suppressed.

In this new political atmosphere, advocates of women’s rights joined with filmmakers who continued to address the gender inequities of the Islamic republic. New forms of communication, including satellite dishes and the Internet, created for Iranians access to Western media and exile groups abroad, who in turn helped broadcast dissident voices from within Iran. International campaigns for human rights, women’s rights, and a nascent democratic civil society in Iran began to take root.

Inside Iran in the mid-1990s, Abdolkarim Soroush, a philosopher with both secular and religious training, attracted thousands of followers to his lectures. Soroush advocated a type of reformist Islam that went beyond most liberal Muslim thinkers of the 20th century and argued that the search for reconciliation of Islam and democracy was not a matter of simply finding appropriate phrases in the Qurʾān that were in agreement with modern science, democracy, or human rights. Drawing on the works of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Popper, and Erich Fromm, Soroush called for a reexamination of all tenets of Islam, insisting on the need to maintain the religion’s original spirit of social justice and its emphasis on caring for other people.

The May 1997 election of Mohammad Khatami, a supporter of Soroush, as president was a surprise for conservatives who had backed Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, speaker of Iran’s Majles. Shortly before the elections, the Council of Guardians had placed Khatami on a list of four acceptable candidates in order to give a greater semblance of democracy to the process. Khatami had been Iran’s minister of culture and Islamic guidance but was forced to resign in 1992 for having adopted a more moderate view on social and cultural issues. He campaigned for president on a platform of curbing censorship, fighting religious excess, and allowing for greater tolerance and was embraced by much of the public, receiving more than two-thirds of the vote and enjoying especially strong support among women and young adults.

The election of Khatami, and his appointment of a more moderate cabinet, unleashed a wave of euphoria among reformers. In less than a year some 900 new newspapers and journals received authorization to publish and added their voices to earlier reformist journals such as Zanān and Kiyān, which had been the strongest backers of Khatami. However, the limits of the reformist president’s authority became clear in the months after his election. The rahbar, Ayatollah Khamenei, continued to exercise sweeping executive powers, which he did not hesitate to use to thwart Khatami’s reforms. In June 1998 the parliament removed Khatami’s liberal interior minister, Abdullah Nouri, in a vote of no confidence, and Tehrān’s mayor, Gholamhussein Karbaschi, was convicted of corruption and jailed by the president’s conservative opponents despite strong public opinion in his favour. Reformist newspapers were accused of offending Islamic principles and shut down one by one, and six prominent intellectuals, including secular nationalist leader Dariyush Farouhar and his wife, Parvaneh Eskandari, were assassinated. Their murders were traced to agents of the Iranian intelligence services, whose representatives claimed that the assassins were acting without orders.

In the February 1999 elections for roughly 200,000 seats on village, town, and city councils, reformers once again won by an overwhelming margin, and many women were elected to office in rural areas. The antidemocratic nature of the office of rahbar was vigorously debated, and calls for its removal from the constitution now began to appear in the press. In July 1999 students protested the closing of the Salām newspaper and opposed further restrictions on the press; and police, backed by a vigilante group known as Anṣār-e Ḥezbollāh, attacked a dormitory at Tehrān University. Four students were reported killed, and hundreds more were injured or detained. On the day after the attack, 25,000 students staged a sit-in at the university and demanded the resignation of Tehrān’s police chief, whom they held responsible for the raid. Within 48 hours, demonstrations had erupted in at least 18 major cities, including Gīlān, Mashhad, and Tabrīz in the north and Yazd, Eṣfahān, and Shīrāz in the south. The demonstrators demanded that the murderers of the Farouhars and other intellectuals be brought to swift justice. They also called for freedom of the press, an increase in personal liberty, an end to the vigilante attacks on universities, and the release of 13 Iranian Jews who had been arrested by the government on allegations that they were spying for Israel. This was the first major student demonstration since the 1979 revolution, and it lasted for five days. By mid-July the government had quelled the protests, and hundreds more were arrested.

In 2001 President Khatami was reelected by an overwhelming majority. Although his victory was considered an expression of support for his programs of reform, at the beginning of his second term there was less popular confidence in his ability to bring about swift and dramatic political change. Attempts by the judiciary to curb pro-reform elements accelerated after Khatami’s reelection, including arrests and acts of public censure. In November 2002 Hashem Aghajari, a prominent reform-minded academic, was sentenced to death by a court in western Iran following a speech he made in support of religious reform, sparking the largest student protests since those of 1999. Aghajari’s death sentence was subsequently reduced, reinstated, and reduced again before he was released on bail in August 2004.

Conservatives return to power

In the month before the Majles elections scheduled for February 2004, the Council of Guardians announced that almost half the candidates in a pool of some 8,000, including many reformists, would be disqualified from participating in the coming elections. The decision—which entailed a ban on some 80 sitting members of the Majles, including President Khatami’s brother—sparked a political crisis, and Khatami himself was among those who subsequently threatened to resign if the ban were not lifted. Following direct intervention by Ayatollah Khamenei, the council reinstated some of the candidates; nevertheless, the conservatives, as expected, emerged victorious in the elections, replacing the more moderate outgoing cabinet.

In January 2005, elections to select Khatami’s successor were set for June of that year. In May more than 1,000 presidential candidates were disqualified by the Council of Guardians from standing in the elections. In the first round of balloting, none of the seven candidates who finally participated surpassed the necessary 50 percent threshold to win outright, and a runoff was held the following week between former president Hashemi Rafsanjani (who had come in first in the initial round) and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the conservative mayor of Tehrān who unexpectedly placed a close second. Subsequently, Ahmadinejad defeated Rafsanjani, securing more than 60 percent of the votes cast.

In contrast to his reform-oriented predecessor, Ahmadinejad generally took a more conservative approach domestically—in 2005 he prohibited state television and radio stations from broadcasting music considered “indecent”—though under his leadership women symbolically were allowed for the first time since the revolution into major sporting events. However, Ahmadinejad’s failure to satisfactorily address continued high rates of inflation and unemployment during his term led to increasing discontent, damaging his favour among segments of both the populace and the administration. His provocative stance regarding Iran’s nuclear program was also a source of criticism among portions of the country’s pragmatic conservative leadership. Thus, although conservative elements consolidated their control of the Majles in the elections of March 2008—once more, many reformist candidates were banned—the presence of conservative elements critical of Ahmadinejad’s policies prepared the way for greater confrontation between the president and the Majles.

Although no Iranian president had yet failed to win a second term, as the 2009 presidential election approached, some observers believed that Ahmadinejad’s economic policies and his confrontational style abroad might have rendered him susceptible to a challenge. Ahmadinejad appeared at particular risk of being unseated by one of his moderate challengers, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, around whom much of the country’s moderate contingent had coalesced. Voter turnout at the election in mid-June was estimated to reach record highs (polling hours were extended four times to accommodate the turnout), a factor that some interpreted as favourable to Mousavi. Shortly after the polls closed, Mousavi—who claimed he had been contacted by the interior ministry to inform him of his victory—announced that he had won the election outright by a large margin; shortly thereafter, however, officials made a similar announcement in favour of Ahmadinejad. Although Ahmadinejad insisted that the election had been fair and that his mandate had been broadened by the large turnout and the scope of his victory, his opponents alleged electoral fraud. Mousavi urged his supporters to protest the results, and, in the days following the election, massive demonstrations—some of them violent—unfolded in the capital and elsewhere. Although Ayatollah Khamenei initially upheld the election results, he subsequently called for an official inquiry by the Council of Guardians (a body of jurists that reviews legislation and supervises elections) into the allegations of electoral irregularities. The decision was quickly followed by an announcement by the Council of Guardians that the vote would be subject to a partial recount, a motion that fell short of the annulment the opposition had sought.

On June 19, following nearly a week of opposition demonstrations against the election results, Khamenei issued his first public response to the unrest: before a crowd of supporters at Friday prayers, he again backed Ahmadinejad’s victory and warned the opposition against further demonstrations. Subsequent protests were greeted with increasing brutality—various reports indicated that between 10 and 20 protesters had been killed—as well as threats of further confrontation. On June 22 the Council of Guardians confirmed that 50 constituencies had returned more votes than there were registered voters (the opposition alleged that as many as some three times that number of constituencies had a turnout greater than 100 percent of eligible voters). Although irregularities in those 50 constituencies bore the potential to affect some three million votes, the Council of Guardians indicated that this would not change the outcome of the election itself. Following the completion of its partial recount, the council solidified Ahmadinejad’s victory by confirming the election results, and in early August Ahmadinejad was sworn in for his second term as president. Periodic demonstrations and protests persisted in the months that followed, including those held on university campuses and others held at public ʿĀshūrāʾ observances in December, when government forces fired on crowds of protesters, killing at least 10 people.

In 2010, under increasing pressure from international economic sanctions, Iran initiated a major change to its state-directed economy, beginning a program to phase out extensive subsidies for food, fuel, medicine, and other consumer goods over a period of five years; the subsidies were to be replaced with direct cash payments to Iranians. Observers had long considered Iran’s subsidy system, implemented during the Iran-Iraq War, a major strain on the Iranian economy since it encouraged wasteful consumption and drained state finances. However, steep rises in the prices of consumer goods starting in 2011 led to fears that subsidy cuts might fuel social unrest.

Demonstrators held antigovernment rallies in Iran in February 2011 following the wave of mass protests in the Middle East and North Africa that swept Tunisian Pres. Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Egyptian Pres. Ḥosnī Mubārak from power. Protesters, ostensibly gathering to show solidarity with Egypt and Tunisia, began chanting slogans critical of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. The Iranian police and paramilitary forces cracked down, firing tear gas into the crowds and attacking demonstrators. Opposition leaders Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi were placed under house arrest to prevent them from participating in the demonstrations.

In June 2013, Hassan Rouhani, a veteran politician and cleric who was generally regarded as a moderate conservative, was elected to succeed Ahmadinejad as president. Rouhani won more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, allowing him to avoid a runoff. The commanding victory was seen as a rebuke to the hard-line faction represented by Ahmadinejad, whom many voters considered responsible for Iran’s growing international isolation and struggling economy.

Foreign affairs since 1989: continuing tension abroad

During his presidency Rafsanjani pushed for restoring economic relations with the West, but Iran, despite its long conflict with Iraq, chose not to join the UN multinational force opposing the invasion of Kuwait. In autumn 1991 Iran moved toward reducing its involvement in Lebanon, which facilitated the release of Westerners held hostage there by Lebanese Shīʿite extremists. However, the Iranian government opposed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and continued to support Islamic groups in Lebanon and in areas under the control of the newly created Palestinian Authority. Iran also allegedly gave financial support to Islamic activists, both Sunni and Shīʿite, in Algeria, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan.

Relations with western Europe and the United States fluctuated. The bounty placed by Iran’s government on author Salman Rushdie on charges of blasphemy, as well as the state-supported assassinations of dozens of prominent Iranian dissidents in Europe, prevented Iran from normalizing relations with many western European countries. In 1992 Sadeqh Sharafkandi, a prominent member of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, and three of his aides were gunned downed in Berlin. The case against those held responsible for the attack was tried in German courts for four years, and in 1997 German authorities indirectly implicated Iranian leaders, including both President Rafsanjani and Ayatollah Khamenei, in the killings. Germany cut off diplomatic and trade relations with Iran, but other European governments continued their economic ties, preventing Iran’s complete isolation.

Most Iranian dissident groups in exile gradually shed their divergent views and agreed that they should work for a democratic political order in Iran. One remaining exception was the National Liberation Army of Iran, a leftist Islamic group based in Iraq that was set up by the Mojāhedīn-e Khalq. But change was evident even in this organization; its officer corps had become mostly female, including many educated Iranians from Europe and the United States.

Difficult relations between Iran and the United States grew more complex in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. Iranian leadership condemned the attacks, though it also sharply opposed U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan the following month. In January 2002 in his State of the Union address, U.S. Pres. George W. Bush categorized Iran as a member of the “axis of evil” (with the regimes of Iraq and North Korea, whom he also described as seeking weapons of mass destruction), an association that was immediately condemned in Iran. U.S. plans for a military intervention in Iraq, a move criticized by President Khatami for its potential to increase instability in the region, also strained the relationship.

Among the most contentious of Iran’s foreign policy issues at the beginning of the 21st century was the ongoing question of the development of its nuclear capabilities. Iran’s nuclear program became the focus of international attention in 2002 when an Iranian dissident group revealed that Iran was secretly constructing a uranium-enrichment facility and a heavy-water reactor. Iran insisted that its nuclear pursuits were intended for peaceful purposes, but the international community, expressing deep suspicion that Iran’s activities included the development of nuclear weapons, advocated efforts to suspend them. International pressure led to a partial suspension of Iran’s nuclear program in 2003, but the nuclear issue returned to the forefront after the election of Ahmadinejad in 2005, when Iran resumed nuclear activities and began to set new limits on its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the international organization responsible for inspecting nuclear sites. International talks failed to convince Iran to suspend its activities again, so in 2006 the UN Security Council passed the first of several rounds of sanctions targeting the nuclear program. Ahmadinejad, a staunch defender of Iran’s right to perform nuclear research, indicated the country’s intent to continue its nuclear activities despite both incentive packages and sanctions put forth by the international community. A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report issued by the U.S. intelligence community in December 2007 indicated with high confidence that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and assessed with moderate confidence that work had not resumed by mid-2007; however, in February 2008 the International Atomic Energy Agency suggested that there existed evidence that Iran had in fact continued nuclear development after the 2003 date put forth by the NIE. Tensions were raised further by Iran’s highly publicized tests of medium- and long-range ballistic missiles and by the revelation in 2009 that Iran was secretly constructing a heavily fortified underground uranium-enrichment facility near the city of Qom. Those developments were followed by a new round of UN sanctions, as well as sanctions by the United States and European Union targeting Iran’s oil and natural gas industries.